When I began reading Louise Erdrich’s newest novel, “The Sentence,” I immediately fell in love with the story and the characters.
Tookie, and Indigenous woman living in Minneapolis, is
sentenced to 60 years after being tricked by two women into committing a
serious crime. She is released after 10 years, and begins working at a
bookstore where her former middle school teacher works, the same teacher who
sent her a dictionary while she was in prison.
In November of 2019, Tookie’s most annoying customer dies and
begins haunting the bookstore whenever Tookie is there alone. Tookie survives
the trauma of her incarceration and her childhood with a drug-addicted mother,
but the haunting, and then the start of the pandemic and the murder of George
Floyd push her to her limits.
I loved all the characters, especially Tookie’s husband,
Pollux, whom she calls her Potawatomi conscience. Pollux is a former boxer and
tribal cop (who in fact arrested Tookie) and now works to preserve his culture,
especially the spiritual aspects. He is quiet and gentle and completely in love
with Tookie.
I also loved that nearly every character is a book lover
whose life revolves around books. One proposes getting a Mount Rushmore-style
tattoo on her chest of her favorite authors. And, since most of the characters
work at a bookstore, they offer to their customers and to us, the readers,
recommendations on current and classic fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. In
fact, at the end of the novel, Erdrich includes “A Totally Biased List of Tookie’s
Favorite Books.” I pored over the list, looking for titles I’d read and titles
that I want to read. I even made a copy of the list to keep.
The story is narrated by Tookie, except for two brief passages
that Pollux narrates, both of them in the last third of the book. I was pleased
to hear Pollux’s voice, and expected to learn more about Tookie, that perhaps
she was not an entirely reliable narrator. However, I was disappointed.
Pollux’s passages are too brief and offer no insight about Tookie. I fail to
see how these passages fit the structure of the novel or add anything essential
to the story.
Another flaw has to do with the climax of the story and how
Tookie finally comes to terms with her trauma and herself. I won’t spoil it for
you, but I’ll just say, I felt there was not enough foundation earlier in the
novel about what would happen at the end.
Of course, I could be wrong, and it could simply be that
Erdrich is avoiding a trope that she has become tired of in literature. Tookie
says about reading in prison, “I found that I could not read just any book. It
had gotten so I could see through books—the little ruses, the hooks, the setup
in the beginning, the looming weight of a tragic ending, the way at the last
page the author could whisk out of the carpet of sorrow and restore a favorite
character” (p 164).
Despite these minor flaws, “The Sentence” is an excellent,
moving book. We see the real trauma that Minneapolis residents experience after
Floyd’s murder, the protests, the police violence, and the riots. However, we
see it through the lens of Indigenous Americans, whose own oppression is
mirrored by that of Floyd’s. Tookie says “…it seemed that around the central
fact of any tragedy there swirled a flotsam of extrania like the twenty-dollar
bill that led to the police call at Cup Foods, the broken taillight that led
the police to stop Philando Castile, the hunger for eggs and a farm woman’s
fury to defend those eggs, an incident that started the Dakota War, the let them eat grass phrase that has kept
it in memory ever since…’ (p 273). Moreover, the prose is beautiful.”
“The Sentence” is a thoroughly enjoyable read. And I continue to port over Tookie’s Biased List as I mark off titles that I’ve read.
No comments:
Post a Comment