To catch a thief

Four Souls

By Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins, 210 pp., $23.95

For nearly two decades Louise Erdrich has been creating a series of unforgettable heroines. Happily, in her latest novel, she returns to one of the most remarkable of these, the fierce, gifted, flawed, and amazingly sexy Fleur Pillager, whom readers last met in ''Tracks" (1988). In a miraculous and menacing scene at the end of that earlier novel, Fleur lost her trees and her land to a white man, John Mauser. Now she takes her mother's secret name, Four Souls, and sets out to wreak revenge.

Or such at least is the point of departure of ''Four Souls," which, although several characters recur, can easily be appreciated without its predecessor. But Erdrich has never been a novelist who goes directly from A to B. The shortest road, for her, is neither the most truthful nor the most interesting; there is always another point of view, another story. She is a writer of splendid complications and digressions. She is also a writer of stunning prose. At a certain point in reading ''Four Souls" I realized it was useless to keep underlining the passages I wanted to quote -- every page was marked -- so here is the first, the opening paragraph:

''Fleur took the small roads, the rutted paths through the wood traversing slough edges and heavy underbrush, trackless, unknown and always bearing east. . . . She crossed fields and skirted lakes, pulled her cart over farmland and pasture, heard the small clock and shift of her ancestors' bones when she halted, spent of all but the core of her spirit."

Fleur follows a railway line to Minneapolis, where she easily finds Mauser's pristine, new house, built partly from her trees, and is taken on as a laundress by Mauser's white sister-in-law. Polly Elizabeth is one of the two principal narrators of ''Four Souls." The other is Nanapush, an elderly Anishinaabeg man still living on the reservation. Both narrators are under Fleur's spell and each has an almost uncanny insight into her thoughts and actions; each also, as gradually emerges, has his or her own story to tell. Polly Elizabeth, plain and sharp-witted, keeps house for the Mausers and poses for her sister's paintings. She hires Fleur in a moment of desperation -- the previous laundress has (magically? fortuitously?) deserted the day before, and the laundry is piling up. Mauser has come back from the First World War with a mysterious condition that makes him sweat profusely; even worse, periodically he falls to the floor, flailing. A few days after Fleur starts work, she finds him having a fit. Using traditional remedies, Fleur begins to nurse her enemy back to health.

John Mauser turns out to be a Gatsby-like figure, a man of uncertain family history. Prior to his marriage to the aptly named Placide, he robbed a number of Ojibwe girls of their land. Now, at his wife's instigation, he practices something called Karezza: ''a conscious conservation of creative energy." When an expert in male diseases comes from Chicago to examine him, the doctor soon determines that the dammed-up sperm going to his brain is the major cause of Mauser's illness. His symptoms are alleviated not so much by the leeches that the doctor applies to his temples but by his falling in love with Fleur, whom he discovers, late one night, snoring outside his bedroom door. When she later tries to cut his throat, he divorces his wife and marries her.

Does this mean that Fleur, who arrived at Mauser's house like a guided missile, has given up on her plan of vengeance? Yes and no. When she first meets Mauser she feels cheated by his frailty. ''She wanted the man healthy so that she could destroy him fresh." After their marriage, she still plans to kill him although she knows she will have to choose more subtle means. But something untoward intervenes. Mauser and Fleur are not practicing Karezza, and Fleur, who has left her daughter behind and suffered a stillbirth, gets pregnant. Once again the Mauser family is reconfigured.

Interwoven with this story and indeed dominating the second half of the novel is the story of the rumbustious, loquacious Nanapush and his love for Margaret, a love that, in his mind, is threatened by two enemies. Along with all the other ills the white man has brought to the Ojibwe -- smallpox, tuberculosis, liquor, regulations -- is a new emotion. ''Greed. There was no word in our language to describe this urge to own things we didn't need. Where before we always had a reason for each object we kept, now the sole reason was wanting it." Margaret is so enraptured with the linoleum at the convent that she sells her son's land to buy this lustrous flooring for their cabin. At around the same time Nanapush's old enemy, Shesheeb, returns from his wanderings and Nanapush becomes convinced that he is trying to seduce Margaret. In his jealousy, he finds increasingly far-fetched ways to woo Margaret and to keep the two apart.

The second half of the novel plays out in a comic key the same struggle between love and vengeance that has governed Fleur's relations with Mauser. Erdrich, like many of her characters, is a true storyteller, and her plot is full of humorous twists and turns. At the heart of ''Four Souls," however, lies the deeply serious question of how Nanapush and Fleur and the other members of their tribe can come to terms with the loss of the land they never thought of themselves as owning until it was taken away. ''Even our bones nourish change, and even a people who lived so close to the bone and were saved for thousands of generations by a practical philosophy, even such people as we, the Anishinaabeg, can sometimes die, or change, or change and become." At a time when questions of ownership and sovereignty, peace and vengeance, are particularly pressing, ''Four Souls" is not only a beautiful and absorbing novel but an extremely timely one.

Margot Livesey is a writer in residence at Emerson College. Her most recent novel is ''Eva Moves the Furniture."