The Sentence (2022)
By Louise Erdrich
Harper, 387 pages.
★★★★★
Forgive repetitive use of the words haunt, ghost, and sentence in this review; they are necessary. The Sentence, a new book by Louise Erdrich, is haunting and brilliant. There are some actual ghosts in the book, or at least we think so. There are many ways to be haunted in both the normal and paranormal. Can the past be a ghost? Our imaginations? Trauma? Madness? Guilt? What about present-day upheaval and social harm?
The book is also about sentences. That word also has multiple meanings and implications. One can be sentenced to jail, to carry a burden, to perform unwanted roles, to atone for past sins, to bear the brunt of anger, or even endure Covid, the latter also an omnipresent haunting.
The protagonist of The Sentence is an Ojibwe woman named Tookie. She is what Native American call a “City Indian” who dwells in Minneapolis, a place haunted by the police murder of George Floyd. Before that happens, Tookie is involved in a harebrained scheme while thinking she was doing a solid for friends. She is talked into bringing them a body from the morgue under false pretenses. Unknown to Tookie, the corpse had drugs taped to his body. Because Tookie had been in trouble earlier in her life, a White judge sentences her to 60 years of incarceration. Luckily, the lawyer she thought was the inept successfully appeals her case and secures her release from prison. The bad news is that she’s haunted by the time she spent in solitary confinement. Tookie maintained her sanity in prison by reading. This, of course, involves different kinds of sentences: printed words upon the pages of books.
When we next meet Tookie, she is married to her soulmate Pollux, the tribal cop who arrested her. He is no longer a cop, rather a gentle man who helps Tookie endure her nightmares and memories. (More hauntings.) Pollux and Tookie are also the de facto parents of the orphaned Hetta. Tookie works in a bookstore that carries mass market titles, classics, and Native-American literature. Jackie, Asema, and Penstemon are supportive colleagues, but Tookie prides herself on choosing the right books for customers, even the cranky ones. She dubs one particularly demanding customer Dissatisfaction, though actually he's an attorney whom she later befriends. The real problem customer is Flora, who dies while reading a sentence in a book and haunts the bookstore. What did she read? What does she want? Her behavior is reminiscent of pixies, naughty but not openly dangerous – until she is.
The Sentence is a complex book that takes us many places, not all of them pleasant. Hetta gets herself in dire straits on several levels and believes that the father of child she’s carrying has ghosted her. Ahh! Another type of haunting and this one for a reason we discover. Flora carries preexisting ghosts that prevent her from moving on. Erdrich guides us through tragic dealings between Native peoples, enslavers, and the governments of both United States and Canada. The infamous Riel rebellions of the Métis peoples and the 19th century come into play. Before Erdrich concludes–and she cameos in her own book–she immerses us in Venn diagram overlaps where legend, life, and the afterlife collide. Have you ever heard of werewolves or rugaboos? Want more? How about Marcel Proust references? Do you know the difference between a quarter and a quatrefoil, let alone the significance of the latter?
You don't have to dig into myth or the 19th century to find points of contact. As I noted earlier, Covid is an ever-present ghost. So too are the riots and protests linked to violence against non-White peoples. When Erdrich details police violence and mob chaos in Minneapolis, the craziness is reminiscent of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. Erdrich writes, "The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world." Yet somehow, she makes sense of this sentence: "Ghosts bring elegies and epitaphs, but also signs and wonders." Can a name haunt us? Read this astonishing book and maybe you will know. I can assure you that her sentences will haunt you.
Rob Weir
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