The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Many books and movies had in their plots some echoes of my secret experiences with Flora. Places haunted by unquiet Indians were standard. Hotels were disturbed by Indians whose bones lay underneath the basements and floors--a neat psychic excavation of American unease with its brutal history. Plenty of what was happening to me happened in fiction. Unquiet Indians. What about unquiet settlers? Unquiet wannabes? According to Penstemon, the earth's magnetism directs many actions in an unseen world. Maybe the bookstore itself was located on some piece of earth crossed by mystical lines. These invisible runes had touched during what... a shift, perhaps cosmically... a solar storm--something had jostled reality.

What is a sentence? In one sense, it's a judgment, like the sentence handed down to Tookie, the narrator of Louise Erdrich's novel The Sentence, which unjustly keeps her locked up for many years. In another sense, of course, it's a string of words, one of the units from which a book is made, like the books that Tookie sells in a Minneapolis bookstore after her release. For Tookie, the bookstore--the real-life Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, owned and operated by Louise Erdrich herself, who appears in the novel--is quite literally a lifesaver. It's a place where she's given a second chance, and one surrounded by the very things, books, which kept her alive during her time in prison. But perhaps these two kinds of sentence are the same in the end: after all, our words have power to pass powerful judgments, even kill, as one seems to have recently killed a bookstore patron named Flora. But in Tookie's case, words have the power to save, to cleanse, and to heal as well.

The problem in The Sentence is not so much that Flora has died, but that she has come back and is haunting the bookstore, and Tookie specifically. Flora was a Pretendian, a white woman desperate to claim an indigenous identity. When Flora's spirit tries to forcibly enter Tookie, in an event Tookie describes as being zipped open and put on like a wetsuit, the imagery is clear enough. But both Tookie and Erdrich have a kind of sympathy for Flora as well, even in her misguided desperation, and Tookie's investigation into Flora's death suggests that she was killed by a sentence in a historical book that exposed the truth about her racial and cultural heritage. What Erdrich suggests is that, if settlers and Pretendians act on Indians like ineradicable spirits, impossible to fully exorcise, so do they haunt themselves, or cannot keep themselves from being haunted by the truth of their relationship to the world as it is.

The Sentence is almost certainly the most personal book that Erdrich has ever written. By writing herself into the book, Erdrich joins a long list of greats, including Patrick White and Martin Amis, who have fashioned themselves into characters in their own books. But The Sentence has a ripped-from-the-headlines quality, too, that follows those momentous events of 2020: the onslaught of COVID-19, which closes the bookstore and gives Flora the ghost more freedom to prod Tookie, and the killing of George Floyd, which brings a conflagration to Minneapolis. I wouldn't say I loved these parts of the book, mostly because the protests seem to bring a stop to the central plot of Flora's haunting, but given how cringey it might have been and how little I think most of us really want to read a book about this stuff, it seems remarkable that they work at all. Ultimately, Erdrich brings it all back together, and we come to understand that the injustice of Floyd's death, the violent reaction to the protests by the Minneapolis police, even the negligence that leads to COVID running rampant, these are all manifestations of the same specters that haunt our country, like Flora haunts the bookstore. And it doesn't sound as cheesy coming from Erdrich.

What really makes it work, though, is the voice of Tookie: brash, brazen, playful, and profound. The first thirty pages, which detail the madcap scheme that got Tookie sent to prison in the first place--a scheme involving a refrigerated truck and a dead body with cocaine taped beneath its armpits--are some of the best writing to come out of Erdrich's pen in many years. The Sentence can't sustain that momentum. Perhaps it's unsustainable, but it certainly establishes a great reserve of goodwill the novel draws from in its more tedious moments. In keeping with other Erdrich books, there are a few other plot threads I haven't mentioned, including Tookie's marriage to the tribal policeman who arrested her and her stepdaughter's new baby by a Canadian Metis man who may or may not be a wolf creature known as a Rougarou. It's that voice, lively and fresh, which brings all of these together and makes The Sentence worth reading. It's a book that understands that words have power.