I just finished Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence, and I am still feeling buzzy. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to do two things at the same time: immediately start reading it again and start messaging my bookish friends to talk them into reading it immediately. I loved so much about this book that this is probably going to be another gushy review in which I worry that I won’t be able to fully convey its wonderfulness. Heck, I’m even a little annoyed that I borrowed a copy from the library because there were so many beautiful passages I wanted to underline.
Tookie is a haunted woman, in both senses of the word. First, she is being haunted by a customer who, annoying in life, continues to be annoying by hanging around the bookstore where Tookie works. (This bookstore also happens to be in Minneapolis and owned by a woman named Louise, very much like this real bookstore). Second, she is haunted by a crime she committed when she was younger and making a lot of bad choices. That crime, laid out in the earliest chapters of the book, is an odd one: she stole a dead body because the woman she loved at the time asked her to. Of the two, the restless ghost of the customer is more troublesome.
Most of The Sentence takes place between November 2019 and November 2020. Erdrich gives us a series of chapters and vignettes that bring us into Tookie’s life. Some of the shorter segments are moments in which Tookie is caught by the beauty of the natural world around her, written in clear language that put that beauty straight into my head. Other chapters show Tookie with her sweet husband, Pollux, or with customers hungry for a new book. Later in the book, we see Covid roll in and change everything, while the protests after the murder of George Floyd spark protests and catharsis. All through this, the ghost keeps coming back and Tookie doesn’t know how to get rid of her.
The structure of the book allows Erdrich to play with other doubles like Tookie’s hauntings: prison sentences and literary sentences, names, police as guardians and police as the violent enforcers of the status quo, different kinds of closeness, waxing and waning relationships, and others. You see why I wanted to go back to the beginning? There is so much to this book that I want to unpack. On the first read through, I was too busy spending time with Tookie and all of the lives (and one un-life) that intersect with hers.
I really loved this book. In fact, I went and bought my own copy from that Minneapolis bookstore so that I can read it again.