Tags
books about reading, Covid, fiction, George Floyd, ghost story, Indigenous author, Minneapolis St. Paul, mystery
I’m going a bit out of order with this next post, but I’m attempting to get a few reviews written in time for my mom’s book club’s annual book selection lunch because I really want them to read these books. Like really want them to. So I’m starting with my first nomination: Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence.
When Flora, Birchbark Books’s most irritating customer, dies, her ghost takes up residence in her beloved bookstore and focuses her attentions on one of the bookstore’s employees, Tookie. After years of incarceration where books were her lifeline, Tookie has rebuilt her life at the bookstore and with her husband, Pollux, and she is not about to let an overactive ghost take that from her. As Tookie tries to solve the mystery of Flora’s haunting, she grapples with what we owe the past and how we move forward into the future, all while Minneapolis burns around her through the onset of Covid and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
I first read Erdrich’s Love Medicine in high school, and I was struck now as I was then by her lyrical, almost dreamlike style, punctuated with bursts of percussive emotion, wrapping around her lived-in and complete characters and crafting raw beauty at the sentence-level. The “sentence” of the title refers to many sentences: Tookie’s unjust prison sentence for the wrong crime, the countless sentences in the books that saved her during her incarceration, the specific sentence in the specific book that she believes killed Flora, and the sentences that we love, that get under our skin and burrow deep, becoming a lens through which we understand ourselves and the world around us. Like those sentences, Erdrich’s story gets under your skin and makes a home inside you. It’s a bit slow to start, with Tookie’s incarceration feeling a bit like the build-up to the main show, which it, in truth, is. But once we start getting to know Tookie and her chosen family–her husband, Pollux; her colleagues, Asema and Penstemon; and Jackie, her former English teacher who sent her books every month while she was in prison and got her the job at the bookstore–we sink into the story of their lives and experiences as if we are part of the group. Though Tookie is our protagonist and audience proxy, at times the perspective flows momentarily toward other characters, providing more context or even a counter to Tookie’s understanding and experiences and deepening our love for her and her imperfect life. The writing occasionally gets a little muddied, but it feels intentional, reflecting Tookie’s emotional state, and though I had to reread a sentence here and there, it didn’t pull me out of the story.
The Sentence is the first novel I have read so far that is a true novel of Covid and the unrest our country has been reckoning with for the past two years. Louise Penny’s latest Inspector Gamache novel takes place in a still not-yet-achieved post-pandemic world and is influenced heavily by the events of the last few years, but because it takes place in the future, I would argue it is not truly a “story of the plague,” the plague of both the actual coronavirus and of police violence rocking our communities. The Sentence, on the other hand, very much is, mostly taking place between All Saints Day 2019 and All Saints Day 2020. It was a bit jarring at first to realize that this book is the first true piece of Covid literature I have read, as I hadn’t really processed that that’s what it was when I first heard about it. Erdrich skillfully and empathetically explores the experience of those first six months of Covid: the fear of getting sick, the isolation, the panic-buying and wiping down of everything that comes into the house, and the daily risk calculations people made to figure out surviving work and life beyond the virus. Layered on top of that is the horror of George Floyd’s murder gripping the wider Twin Cities (and the country) and how those daily risk calculations shift to make room for action and activism. By setting the novel in Minneapolis’s Indigenous community, Erdrich allows her readers insight into a community’s response to the pandemic and the unrest in their home while also shedding light on her own personal experience as a member of that same Indigenous community and owner of the real Birchbark Books (deemed essential during the pandemic). I didn’t even make this connection at first, but Erdrich literally writes herself into the book. The fictional bookstore owner is also an author named Louise who is on a book tour when the pandemic starts. By centering the story so close to her own individual and communal experience, Erdrich does what all the best authors do: she creates immediacy, connection, and empathy in her readers by making the historic real and personal and shared in the here and now.
The Sentence is remarkable: a statement on unthinkable events that became real, a sharing of individual and communal trauma and resilience, a love letter to books and to those who sell them and read them, and a exploration of where and how we, individually and collectively, go from here. It is about the importance of finding hope and joy in the darkness. You have to be ready for The Sentence. There is not a reader on this planet who was not impacted by the events informing the story, and it might be hard for some. However, it is absolutely worth the ride, and honestly, I think that everyone should read it.