February 25, 2022
The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich
“Even one person of a certain magnetism in this time can seize the energy and cause a maelstrom to form around each sentence they utter. One person can create a giant hurricane of unreality that feels like reality.
‘That’s what’s happening,’ she said. ‘Just look around.’
I didn’t have to. I felt like I could see everything—hatred valor, cruelty, mercy. It was all over the news and in the hospitals and all over me. Watching and waiting…had turned me inside out.”
I loved this extraordinary novel so completely, The Sentence a fiction made up of all kinds of pieces from the world, its characters including its author, Louise Erdrich herself, who flits in and out of the text, and with Birchbark Books, the independent bookshop Erdrich owns in Minneapolis, the backdrop for much of the story.
Set between November 2019 and November 2020, the novel’s protagonist is Tookie, an Indigenous woman struggling with returning to ordinary life after an incarceration, and who, on one of her shifts at Birchbark Books, is one of the first staff members to discern that the store is haunted by one very specific ghost, namely that of their most charmingly annoying customer, a white woman called Flora who had been an enthusiast for all things Indigenous.
As the trouble with Flora’s ghost escalates—she keeps knocking books onto the floor—much else is going on, of course—it’s 2020 after all. Tookie’s husband’s daughter—with whom Tookie has always had a fractious relationship—turns up with a newborn baby son. And then Louise takes off on a new book tour in mid-February, as news of a novel coronarvirus is becoming ever closer and closer to home, and I had such a visceral reaction to this part of the novel, back when everyone was wiping down surfaces and proceeding “out of an excess of caution.” Erdrich captures it so well, the looming dread, the incredible unknown, and the unfathomable way that time kept passing.
The bookshop closes to customers and Tookie and her colleagues find their work deemed “essential”, and so they spend their days socially distanced and packing up online orders, which arrive in surprising numbers. (Another visceral reaction for me was recalling that sad forever spring, and how wonderful and uplifting it was to have an order of books from local indies landing on our doorstep…) And Flora, or her ghost, at least, is still there, her presence becoming more urgent, beginning to seem dangerous.
But danger is everywhere after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis that May, killed by police at the store where Tookie’s husband goes sometimes. The city erupts in rage and violence (the chapter is called “Minneapolis Goddamn”), explosive and uncontainable, and Tookie fears for her loved ones and for the future, her own impressions and experiences of police violence kept close to her chest, but here and there they burble to the surface and recall her own sentence in prison, and are complicated by the fact that her husband is a former officer. But still she feels with all those grieving Black mothers, and she knows the names of the men who’ve gone before, and she knows too that Indigenous people are just as likely to be murdered by the police, but you’re probably not going to hear about it, these crimes happening in more remote places where people aren’t happening by with cellphone cameras.
This book is everything. Comedy, tragedy, current events, recommended reading list (it’s so gloriously bookish!), ghost story, love story, a story of community, and also a harrowing tale of individual survival and resilience, and I just loved it so much, and it found it to be a comfort in the light of our own tumultuous moment, reminding me of all the things that really matter and the spectacular possibilities of books.
