Tracks is part of a tetralogy that includes Love Medicine (1984), linked short stories; The Beet Queen (1986), novel; and The Bingo Palace (1994), novel.
While Tracks stands as an independent work, the novel gains in resonance when seen in the context of Love Medicine and The Beet Queen. The butcher shop and its owners, the Kozkas, and other characters, such as Russell Kashpaw, were introduced in The Beet Queen. The sadistic nun, Sister Leopolda of Love Medicine, who tortures Marie Lazarre, is none other than Pauline, one of the narrators of Tracks, and the girl she is torturing in Love Medicine is her own illegitimate daughter, the girl she tries to abort and unwillingly gives birth to in Tracks. Erdrich's newer novels seem to enlarge previous ones, deepening the texture of her fictional world.
In Tracks Erdrich has simplified her narrative perspective and her story line, creating a novel more symbolically compressed and unified than her earlier works. Tracks is a more painful book than its predecessors, and possibly more powerful.
Craig Barrow. "Tracks: Related Titles." Beacham's Encylopedia of Popular Fiction. Ed. Kirk H. Beetz. Vol. 7. Beacham-Gale, 1996. 4 June 2009
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