Alive and Awake : In Louise Edrich’s fiction, love is inseparable from pain. It’s needy, passionate, insane, transcendent, but it’s our only hope. : THE BINGO PALACE, <i> By Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins: $23; 288 pp.)</i>

“We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment. We all got to face the nothingness before us and behind. Call it sleep. We all begin in sleep and that’s where we find our end. Even in between, sleep keeps trying to claim us. To stay awake between, sleep keeps trying to claim us. To stay awake in life as much as possible--that may be the point.” These are the words of Lipsha Morrissey, the primary narrator of Louise Erdrich’s wonderful new novel, “The Bingo Palace.” Lipsha is the illegitimate and barely grown-up son of June Kashpaw and Gerry Nanapush, characters we know from Erdrich’s earlier books centered on the reservation community in North Dakota, “Love Medicine,” “The Beet Queen” and “Tracks.” He is a philosopher, a ne’er-do-well; he is charming, frightened, full of rough wisdom, and alone. “The Bingo Palace” is in a large part Lipsha’s search for himself, for his past and his future, for love and meaning, for a compromise with the universe that he can call truth.

“We never ask for all this heat and silence in the first place, it’s true,” Lipsha says. “This package deal. It’s like a million-dollar worthless letter in the mail. You’re chosen from the nothingness, but you don’t know for what. You open the confusing ad and you think, Shall I send it in or should I just let the possibilities ripen? You don’t know (anything)! You are left on your own doorstep! You are set there in a basket, and one day you hear the knock and open the door and reach down and there is your life.”

Lipsha’s reaching down is the motor that drives “The Bingo Palace,” and he plunges deeper and deeper into his own desire and desperation as he attempts to translate into language the wild and lonely music of his heart.

When Lipsha returns to the reservation at the novel’s opening, he is forced to confront a horrible truth about his childhood: His mother tied him in a gunnysack and threw him in the river, and by the time his grandmother rescued him, he should have been long drowned. Lipsha is obsessed with his mother’s memory, and the hole she has left in his life is immense: “There is no age to her,” he says of her when her ghost comes to visit, “ancient, brand-new, slim as a girl. Take your pick. She is anyone, everyone. She is my mother.”

Lipsha tries to fill that hole by loving a young woman named Shawnee Ray--which he does desperately and irretrievably. Unfortunately for Lipsha, Shawnee Ray is engaged to Lipsha’s boss, Bingo master and entrepreneur Lyman Lamartine. Shawnee Ray loves both these men, but understands that to choose between them is no choice at all. Her father has taught her the lesson of the butterfly, and she is able to dance her way out of the world of men.

As is always the case in Erdrich’s novels, the male characters and the female characters exist in two entirely separate realities. We see the men eating, drinking, making deals that involve money, fighting over women, beating each other up. The women hold all the real power in Erdrich’s universe, the power to dance, the power to throw spells and curses, the power to speak like a skunk and to cough like a bear, the power to choose, like our old friend Fleur Pillager, their own place and time and path into death.

There is a dark and insistent relationship between the power these women have and their sexuality. It is what liberates them as well as what enslaves them. Inside their passion is the place where they find the strength to transcend the pain and inconsistency in their lives, the strength to transcend even that same passion and own it, to die if that is what is required, to set themselves free:

“He touched her, his hands like hot bells. He took off her ropes but kept her bound up with his fingers. They were steel clamps. They found her, found her, until she galloped against him. No matter where she went, his tongue came down. Then the wheel sang again, flew off its spokes and banged into a brilliant wall. There was a way a man could get into her body and she never knew. Pain rang everywhere. June tried to climb out of it, but his chin held her shoulder. She tried to roll from underneath, but he was on every side. Skeins of sparks buzzed down, covered her arms and face. Then she was so small she was just a burning dot, a flung star moving, speeding through the blackness, the air, faster and faster and with no letup until she finally escaped into a part of her mind, where she made one promise before she went out.

“ Nobody ever hold me again .”

In “The Bingo Palace,” passion is always inseparable from pain and love is allowed its full myriad of nuance, of meaning, is never pinned down or defined. Love is needy, all-consuming, passionate, insane, transcendent, paralyzing, corruptive, destructive, and at the same time it is our only real hope for salvation, for life.

Louise Erdrich’s books all have a stoic wisdom, an unwillingness to judge, a commitment to objective observation that records each emotional event entirely, without ever sacrificing complexity of meaning. “The Bingo Palace” is full of that wisdom--and has the honest and exquisite rhythms readers look for in Erdrich’s prose--but what makes this her most exciting and satisfying book to date is the character of Lipsha Morrissey. In him, Erdrich has allowed the wisdom to get mixed up with a passion, a fire, a love, that is anything but stoic, and when the passion meets the wisdom, as it does when Lipsha seduces Shawnee, the heat fairly rises off the page.

Hopeful, wrenching, funny, sexy, intense and penetratingly true, “The Bingo Palace” is a book that wakes us up if we’ve been sleeping, that rekindles our desires, that makes us believe in all the power within us that we can neither reckon with nor define.

“It seems like everything worth having is within my grasp,” Lipsha says. “All I have to do is reach my hand into the emptiness.”