White appropriation and the attempted decimation of Native identity have also been Erdrich's abiding subjects. Throughout her long career and most recently in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Night Watchman, Erdrich has interwoven the workings of things seen and unseen into her writing.
There's also a suspicion that Flora's death may have been caused by the last sentence of the last book that she was reading. But, as the pandemic, manifests itself in late winter of 2020, Flora's behavior grows more sinister - she wants to take possession of Tookie, who shifts from pissed-off to petrified. Tookie calls her "a stalker - of all things Indigenous." At first Flora's spectral activities are confined to footsteps and book reshufflings.
But she did not disappear."įlora was a white woman, who patronized Birchbark, which specializes in Native books. Erdrich herself makes sporadic appearances here, but she's by no means the most jarring presence in the bookstore, as Tookie ominously tells us: "In November 2019, death took one of my most annoying customers. Mercifully released after 10 years, Tookie, who's Native American, lands a job at Birchbark Books in Minneapolis - the very same independent bookstore that Louise Erdrich owns in real life. She tells us that "the most important skill I'd gained in prison was how to read with murderous attention." Tookie pulled off the snatch, but didn't notice that packets of cocaine were taped under the corpse's armpits. Our narrator, a wry and resourceful woman named Tookie, recalls the misdeed that, years earlier, landed her in federal prison.īack then, Tookie drove a refrigerated grocery van and she was asked by a grieving friend to steal the corpse of a recently deceased lover away from another woman's house. Erdrich's story starts in a slapstick crime mode, reminiscent of the novels of Elmore Leonard. For Erdrich, these strange times call for a ghost story that sometimes shifts into social realism: specifically, into an account of the first months of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd.Īn absorbing and unquiet novel, The Sentence, like the era we're living through, keeps us readers on the alert for the next improbable turn of events looming ahead of us. The Sentence is part of a vanguard of fall fiction - by writers as disparate as Jodi Picoult, Gary Shteyngart, and Michael Connelly - that tries to capture a splintering America during this long pandemic moment. The Sentence: It's such an unassuming title (and one that sounds like it belongs to a writing manual) but, Louise Erdrich's latest is a deceptively big novel, various in its storytelling styles ambitious in its immediacy.
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