6
NOVEMBER 24�DECEMBER 1, 2021
FROM THE SHELF
CHECKING OUT THE
WORLD OF BOOKS
There are ghosts aplenty populating
Louise Erdrich’s new novel, ‘The Sentence’
A customer’s ghost complicates the
life of a Native bookseller in this timely
novel by the Pulitzer Prize winner
By Ellen Akins
Star Tribune
I
guess you could call Louise Erdrich’s
new novel, “The Sentence,” a ghost
story, though that implies a certain scary
spookiness the book does not possess.
But there are ghosts aplenty, and one in
particular certainly spooks the novel’s
Ojibwe narrator, Tookie, whose nickname
seems a quick take on her character,
tough cookie.
At the outset, Tookie tells us about
having been in prison for 10 years for
what seems an almost slapstick crime,
committed when “for many reasons, I
didn’t know who I was yet. Now that I
have a better idea, I will tell you this: I am
an ugly woman.” Well, there’s consider-
ably more to her than that, and much of
“The Sentence” is devoted to fi guring
out what that is.
Conveniently, this endeavor is facili-
tated by Tookie’s having spent her prison
time reading voraciously, a learning
binge begun with books supplied by her
“seventh-grade teacher in the reservation
school,” Jackie, who happens to work in a
Minneapolis bookstore that specializes in
Native literature, where Tookie gets a job.
This unnamed bookstore closely
resembles a Minneapolis bookstore
owned by Erdrich, not least because its
owner, Louise, is a writer setting off on a
book tour just as the pandemic is taking
hold, at about the same time that Erdrich
would’ve been promoting her last novel,
“The Night Watchman,” winner of the
2021 Pulitzer Prize.
The nature of the bookstore and its
largely Native staff attract a certain sort
of customer, the Indian-curious and wan-
nabe; one of the most egregious of these,
Tookie’s “most annoying favorite custom-
er,” is Flora, who claimed to have an Indian
great-grandmother and has recently died
with, as her foster daughter explains, “this
book splayed open beside her ... implying
she’d not had time to use a bookmark.”
This book, an antique bound journal
Harper
titled “The Sentence: An Indian Captivity
1862-1883,” comes into Tookie’s hands
and proceeds to haunt her almost as
vigorously as does Flora’s persistent and
aggressive ghost. Why this is, and what
it has to do with Tookie’s own troubled
life history and identity, is what “The
Sentence” is mostly about, though what
constitutes an identity in general and in
t
sco oo u k n s on a ly)
i
d
0% d b ing
particular is the larger question threaded
through the novel. “I really believe that to
live inauthentically is to live in a sort of
hell,” one of Tookie’s co-workers says —
but determining what’s authentic can be
somewhat hellish, too, it seems.
Clearly having been written in the
midst of the events that overtake its
characters — the coronavirus and then
the Twin Cities’ eruption over the murder
of George Floyd — the book has a some-
times disconcerting you-are-there quality,
which can seem out of step with the story
proper, though the events do amplify the
novel’s themes of social and personal
connection and dissociation, and of the
historic crimes and contemporary ag-
gressions, micro and overt, perpetrated in
the name of white supremacy.
What does hold everything together
here, fi ttingly enough in a novel so much
of which takes place in a bookstore, is the
connection made through reading. And
one of the great charms of “The Sen-
tence” for an avid reader is the running
commentary on books — recommenda-
tions, judgments, citations, even, at the
end, a “Totally Biased List” of Tookie’s
favorites. As she tells us: “The door is
open. Go!”
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