2022/156: The Sentence — Louise Erdrich

'Sadly, or heroically, depending on the way you look at it, books do kill people.’
‘In places where books are forbidden, of course, but not here. Not yet. Knock wood. What I’m trying to say is that a certain sentence of the book — a written sentence, a very powerful sentence — killed Flora.’
Louise was silent. After a few moments she spoke. ‘I wish I could write a sentence like that.’[p. 171]

The Sentence opens with Tookie, an Ojibwe woman with some reckless habits and a sharp, mordant sense of humour, being sentenced to 60 years by 'a judge who believed in the afterlife'. Her crime? Accidentally smuggling a cocaine-laden corpse across state lines. Prison is not as awful as it might have been, because Tookie realises she has a library in her head, made up of all the books she's ever read. And people are working towards her freedom: after ten years, she's freed. She marries Pollux, the tribal policeman who arrested her, and takes a job in a bookstore specialising in Native books.

In another novel, that would be the novel. Here it's the setup, the first fifty pages. The real story starts on the Day of the Dead -- 2nd November, 2019 -- with the death of Flora, a white woman who claimed Indigenous origins. ("The woman in the picture looked Indianesque, or she might have just been in a bad mood," Tookie decides, on being shown a photograph of Flora's purported forebear.) But Flora has not departed: she's haunting the bookstore, and there's something she wants. Maybe it's to do with the book she was reading when she died, which Tookie has inherited: The Sentence: An Indian Captivity...

And then Covid. And then the murder of George Floyd.

There are a lot of layers to this novel, and -- like the nuances of the setting -- I'm not sure that I, a white British reader, am qualified to appreciate or understand them all. I did appreciate the ways in which Tookie was haunted, not only by Flora (who becomes much more menacing as the book progresses) but by her own past, her family heritage and the expectations (positive and negative) of others. I was fascinated by the complexity of the relationships, especially between Tookie's generation and the younger generation. There was an uplifting sense of community, even while Erdrich acknowledged the issues experienced by and within that community: and there was a spirit of optimism, of hope, after the outrage sparked by Floyd's murder. (I fear that optimism has dissipated in the intervening years.) The heart, the purpose, of the novel is Tookie, and she is such a compelling and engaging character that I wasn't bothered by uneven pacing or elided details. There's magic here, as well as the mundanity of pandemic life (were US bookstores really deemed 'essential services'? Hurrah!) and the tensions between family members, between employees, between neighbours. The Sentence made me happy, even when it was enraging or poignant or tragic or, sometimes, a little too rose-tinted.

NB: features the author as a character: yes, 'Louise' in the quotation above is Louise Erdrich, owner of an Indigenous bookstore, haunted by a kinder ghost than Flora.

Fulfils the ‘featuring a library or bookstore’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.