The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Harper 365 pp

By Celia McGee

Death is no joke in The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich, but it has a funny way of saying so. Tookie, the self-deprecating, shoot-from-the-hip heroine of Erdrich’s seventeenth novel, is just minding her own business, which happens to be helping run a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis specializing in Indigenous history and literature and a whole lot more that Tookie cares a great deal about, and abundantly shares with anyone who enters the store, or her life.  She knows her Jean Rhys and her Turgenev, her Amitav Ghosh and Stendhal, her Clarice Lipsector, Joseph Conrad and Octavia Butler, and, as an Ojibwe woman of a certain age, her Native American annals and lore. She’s only half a figment of Louise Erdrich’s imagination--Erdrich owns Birchbark Books and Native Arts in Minneapolis. But what an imagination it is.

It turns out that no amount of reading, and certainly not Tookie's open-hearted approach to customer relations, quite prepares her for one of the regulars doing her the opposite of a favor by showing up dead, that is, as a ghost. 

Tookie has a generous sense of humor, but this will have her sorely tried.  It’s All Soul’s Eve of 2019, which, for the purposes of calendar keeping, checks the pandemic as six months away, followed six months later by the pestilential killing, just blocks to the south, of George Floyd.  (As a narrator, Tookie is quick to correct Thanksgiving to “thankstaking.”) So there’s much else haunting the novel besides Flora, a bracelet-jangling nemesis to Tookie and acting all wannabe Native American in life, and an increasing burden, at all hours and corners of the bookstore, now that she’s apparently a giddy ghoul. An ancient and shadowy book may be to blame, which raises questions about the power of reading, the dangers of misreading, and how much a reader owes the written word and those behind it.

Neither personal resentment, intellectual skepticism nor informed wisecracks will remove Flora’s dead weight from around Tookie’s neck, and when Flora straight up tries to introduce herself into Tookie’s body, Tookie has really had it up to there. She has had an encounter or two with hard times before. She calls herself “an ugly woman,” but that’s because of what she’s seen, not who she is. Doled out a wasteland legacy as a Native American, as good as orphaned by a mother wed to drugs, she was a smart kid gone so wrong that the prison sentence she ended up with--for the foreshadowing crime of “body-snatching” –was an obscene 60 years. She was saved by books. One sentence piled upon the next raised her up, delivering her back to the outside within a decade’s time, and straight into the waiting arms of Pollux, the tribal policeman—now ex—who first arrested her.

Their marriage remains a work in progress, mostly because Tookie and happiness don’t always occupy the same space, and because the empty nest they’ve grown accustomed to suddenly has to make new accommodations.  Their unmoored daughter, Hetta, a blessedly unsuccessful soft-porn movie actress, moves home with the extra baggage of a newborn whose father may well be an interesting young man known to frequent Tookie’s bookstore, a paying book lover working his way through an unpaid debt to society. Tookie wouldn’t be Tookie if she didn’t expect the frayed wiring of family relationships to short circuit—the old Hetta specialized in sullen stonewalling—and she doesn’t quite know what to do when it seems to be healing itself.  And she brings work home. 

In the thick of the pandemic, she and her boss, Jackie, find themselves classified as “essential workers” by the authorities. Thrust into the role of COVID shamans, it’s a mixed blessing as their resources and their tempers are stretched thin, caught short by “the disease of unmixed dread.” But they’ll take it.

A larger haunting, of The Sentence’s richly textured locale and of the nation, drops its pall on May 25.  Tookie watches her daughter watch her husband watch the video of a police shooting near the Powderhorn Park intersection of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, and “nobody in the Cities would sleep for many a night as the city grieved and burned.”

Erdrich is ready for that closeup, as she’s always been when it comes to this part of American geography and history. “The MPD has fucking done this to the Indians since the beginning of this city,” Hetta says. “No, before that. They practiced on us….” A landscape of its own, Erdrich’s writing seeks the bright shout of red in a street mural woven from Indigenous myths. It drapes stories over stop lights. It stocks up on beauty in convenience stores. Her granularity celebrates the gritty specific, ravenous for recipes handed down across generations and cultures (don’t get Tookie started on Pollux’s scorched rice), surfs the air waves for entertainment and solace, and reads deep into every word from which her literary encyclopedia of a mind has built this novel. That The Sentence can also be filed under Mystery, its plot arcane, twisted and life-restoring, confirms Erdrich at her best.

Celia McGee is a book critic and arts writer in New York.