The Sentenceby Louise Erdrich
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781472157003
Publication Date: November 9, 2021
Pages: 387
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Little Brown Book Group
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading 'with murderous attention,' must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation and furious reckoning.
The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.
What an extraordinary read. From first page to last I was awed and riveted. There was a lot of pain in this book, but Erdrich never overwhelmed the story or the reader with it; there was humor subtly woven through the words like sweetgrass, but it never took over. The angst – something I’m not normally keen to read about – was authentic, and both was and wasn’t a focus of the story.
It seems that I can only be swayed to read literary fiction when there’s a ghost involved. First Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and now The Sentence. Neither has let me down or made me regret my choice, but I think I might like The Sentence more, even though I rated it half a star lower. Lincoln in the Bardo was often difficult to read as the human condition was a little too magnified, human and on display to really enjoy it. But the structure just blew me away. The Sentence has a traditional narrative structure, and I became invested in the characters’ lives and cared what happened to them, although Tookie’s journey to prison is, while shortly told, both painful and painfully funny.
There are really two, maybe three, stories in this book. The Sentence begins with the aftermath of Flora’s death and her initial haunting of the bookshop, all of which happens in November 2019. As the season and the months progress so, too, does Flora’s haunting, seeming to focus on Tookie more than anyone else, and escalating in alarming ways.
Then as 2020 progresses into that fateful March, another story takes over – the story of the pandemic; how it crept up on people and suddenly exploded on the scene in a flurry of hand-washing, sanitisers, and food hoarding. Stay-at-home orders. Keeping the bookstore, Birchbark books open. At this point, I think, this story becomes more fictography, and Flora’s ghost fades to almost nothingness as the narrative is about surviving, staying open, staying safe.
And then George Floyd is murdered by a policeman in broad daylight. Now the story becomes a fictitious memoir, but only in the sense that the names have changed. This is the Native American perspective of the riots and it’s about as an effective narrative of the pain, anguish, anger, frustration, bitterness, hope, and need to heal as any I’ve read. It is the hardest part of the book to read.
As Minneapolis puts things back together, Flora comes back to the forefront of the plot again. These last few chapters were still beautifully written but it’s this part of the story that kept me from going to the full 5 stars. The ‘solution’ to Flora’s haunting seems suddenly abrupt; their idea for her release seems to come out of nowhere, although it’s totally in keeping with the theme of the book. The characters don’t know there’s a theme, so how did they suddenly get from what are were going to do? to wait! I know what she wants! ? There’s no progression here, so it feels bolt-of-lightning-from-the-blue-ish. And then the revelation Tookie has that does banish Flora. I know exactly what Erdrich was trying to do, and I know exactly to what earlier part of the story she was trying to tie it to, but it was clumsily done. I was left floundering for several paragraphs, and even when the ‘denouement’ came, it failed to have the emotional impact it should have had – I feel Erdrich missed a step that kept the reader from feeling the full power of the gut punch we’re meant to feel.
It doesn’t really matter though – this is a read that will remain with me, and one I want to talk about with everybody I come into contact with. A damn good story.