Louise Erdrich's "Love Medicine" presents a troubled and troubling reimagining of life on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. In analyzing the novel, critics have generally ignored its descriptions of economic structures, class stratifications, and work conditions. In this essay, the author argues that these socioeconomic conditions are central to understanding the lived experience the novel engages. He also argues for a way of reading responsibly that neither evades nor elides characters' experiences of socioeconomic realities. He presents two reading strategies that analyze how economic structures, class hierarchies, and work culture shape characters' lives on and off the reservation. The first emphasizes the ways socioeconomic status impinges on the characters' senses of identity. While this first socioeconomic approach emphasizes "class as a place in a social ranking," the next approach focuses on the "economic relation (of exploitation) between producers and non-producers, working and nonworking classes," that is, class as an economic condition. Although these two socioeconomic approaches use a class analysis differently, both understand class hierarchies as a form of domination. Erdrich sensitively represents her characters' painful struggles to find well-being while living within systems of oppression. (Contains 52 notes.)