Beat generations

The Painted Drum
By Louise Erdrich
HarperCollins, 277 pp., $25.95

It is more than 20 years since Louise Erdrich published her remarkable novel ''Love Medicine," which was for many readers their introduction to Native American characters. Since then, Erdrich has continued to map her own, unique fictional territory, and for those who have followed her explorations, several landmarks have become familiar: the power of the dead to influence the living; the power of the past to shape the present; the struggle of women caught between lovers and children; the relations between Native and non-Native Americans. Now, in her new novel, ''The Painted Drum," Erdrich once again takes on these crucial themes as she unfolds the absorbing story of a large cedar drum.

The novel opens in present-day New Hampshire with Faye Travers, a middle-aged, part Ojibwe woman, who lives with her mother on Revival Road. ''From the air," Faye tells us, ''our road must look like a ball of rope flung down haphazardly, a thing of inscrutable loops and half-finished question marks. But there is order in it to reward the patient watcher." The road has its story. So, too, does Faye, and part of the pleasure of the first section is the way in which she gradually begins to reveal it as the past inexorably interrupts the safe routines she has tried to construct with her mother.

One Saturday in the dead of winter a neighbor of Faye's, a boy named Davan Eyke, wrecks his family's car, and subsequently moves in with a sculptor who lives farther down Revival Road. Davan's move propels two lines of the plot. The sculptor, Kurt Krahe, is also Faye's secret lover. He lets himself into her house at night and makes his way to her room, where the two physically amaze each other. Neither Faye nor her mother ever mentions these nocturnal visits. But when Davan ends up having a second, more serious car accident, the balance between Kurt and Faye begins to shift. For the first time, he is the one to need her; he takes her out to dinner, he cuts her grass, he prunes her ruined apple orchard.

This last is particularly unwelcome to Faye, and eventually we learn why. One day long ago in the orchard she lost, in different ways, her younger sister and her parents. Since then she feels she has no life of her own but only other people's lives. This feeling is fed by her profession of appraising estates. In an eloquent passage she describes finding among a woman's effects a pile of handkerchiefs, each one labeled with a date and an occasion: ''First Opera, La Traviata. Wedding. Broken Arm. . . . A woman's lifetime of tears."

It is in her professional capacity that Faye visits the house of a victim of Davan's last wild car ride: an elderly man whose grandfather was an Indian agent on the Ojibwe reservation where Faye's grandmother was born. When his heir summons Faye to appraise the estate, she finds a magnificent collection of Native American artifacts, including an exquisitely decorated Ojibwe drum. It is love at first sight. She hears the drum -- ''one deep, low, resonant note" -- and as soon as she is alone she hides it in her car and brings it home. She has never before stolen so much as a candy bar. Now, lying in the dark of her room, she thinks that her ''instinctive theft signifies a matter so essential that it might be called survival."

The drum has long been linked with survival. The next two sections of the novel describe how it came to be made and what happens after Faye and her mother return it to the reservation. No summary could do justice to these intricate and beautifully written pages with their larger and smaller stories gracefully woven together, but two in particular stand out.

The first is that of Anaquot, the mother of another legendary Erdrich character, Fleur Pillager. In the depths of winter Anaquot leaves her husband and son and takes her two daughters to join her lover. After a perilous journey, she arrives at his cabin only to be received with coldness by a woman she assumes is his sister. But the woman is his wife, and she has lured Anaquot here to kill her. Day by day, however, Anaquot wins her over. In a thoroughly satisfying way, the two become allies and sew a damningly beautiful dance outfit for Simon Jack, the man who has betrayed them both.

The second story concerns Ira, and is the most suspenseful of the book. Once again in the depths of winter, Ira leaves her three children alone in a cabin and goes into town in search of food. While she sits drinking in a bar, the cabin burns down and the children start walking through the frozen woods to the house of their nearest neighbor, Bernard, who has, since Faye returned it, become the guardian of the drum. As the narrative alternates between Ira and her children, I felt an almost unbearable urge to rush into the book and intervene.

Happily I couldn't, because how much more interesting are the complexities Erdrich imagines for her characters than the simple-minded good fortune I would visit upon them. The final section of the novel returns to Revival Road, where Faye, her mother, and her lover must all work out their various griefs. Reading these pages, I understood that Erdrich is a writer who believes that life is change and who is never afraid to let her characters experience it, for good, and ill -- and good again. That, for me, rather than the talismanic drum, was the heart of this wonderful novel.

Margot Livesey's most recent novel, ''Banishing Verona," is published in paperback this month. She is a writer in residence at Emerson College.