''I saw the passing of times you will never know,'' Nanapush tells his granddaughter. The story is narrated, like a ballad, in alternating verses: the first voice is that of Pauline Puyat, Marie's crazed, visionary mother, who's torn between a commitment to the past and her willful desire to become a Christian martyr the second voice is that of a tribal elder named Nanapush, a canny ''arranger of secrets,'' gifted in the ancient arts of storytelling and magic.
''Tracks'' takes place before the earlier novels, around the time of the first world war, when Indian tribes were struggling to hold on to what remained of their lands, and it focuses on the tangled family histories of several characters previously introduced in ''Love Medicine,'' including Marie Lazarre and Eli and Nector Kashpaw. Erdrich has created a mythical place, created it out of imagination, legend and memories of her own youth in North Dakota and by charting its collective history of loss in lapidary, poetic prose, she has given it a fierce reality in her readers' minds. As Faulkner did in his Yoknapatawpha County novels, Ms.
In three luminous volumes, ''Love Medicine'' (1984), ''The Beet Queen'' (1986) and her latest novel, ''Tracks,'' Louise Erdrich has mapped out the spiritual and physical geography of a North Dakota town named Argus, and the fluctuating fortunes of several generations of its residents, most of them Indians displaced by time and change and the encroachments of an alien civilization.
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