by Corrine Watson
October 28, 2021
Rachel León’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review, Nurture, Entropy, (mac)ro(mic), and The Rupture. She was a 2020-2021 fellow at Stony Brook University’s BookEnds Program and is the Reviews Editor for West Trade Review.
The Sentence by Loiuse Erdrich; ; Harper; 400 pages; $28.99
Following the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence, explores what it means to be haunted. Our characters are haunted by the past, both personal and historical, as well as looming fears in the midst of a global pandemic. Beginning on All Soul’s Day 2019 and ending a year later, the story reckons with the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and the protest uprising in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd by the police. The text is masterfully balanced between humorous and heartbreaking as Erdrich cuts tragedy with her character’s wildly witty personalities as they explore their own trauma and flaws, as well as what it means to be Indigenous in modern America while honoring the people, stories, and culture that was lost to colonization.
Our protagonist, Tookie, is strong-willed, devilishly clever, and a bit abrasive, and we see her progressively soften as she faces her personal demons. She starts at a low after being incarcerated for moving a corpse across state lines as a favor for a friend, and her sentencing was compounded by the fact that the body had cocaine duct taped to the armpits. Unfortunately, Tookie’s defense that “Indigenous people don’t recognize state lines” and that she didn’t check the armpits wasn’t enough to set her free, but her sentence was commuted to ten years. Back in her hometown, she marries Pollux, the ex-tribal cop who arrested her and gets a job as a bookseller at Birchbark Books, Erdrich’s own independent bookstore in Minneapolis. Although she’s turned her life around, she’s still haunted by her actions and the ghost of the dead man she disturbed. But it isn’t until All Soul’s Day 2019 where the ghost of her least favorite customer, Flora, forces her to face the complexities and tragedies of the past in order to set herself and the spirits free from their personal purgatory.
In life, Flora was best described as a connoisseur although Tookie would prefer the term ‘wannabe,’ as Flora was particularly obsessed and determined to find a personal connection to Native culture. For Flora, the ‘wanting to be Indian in a former life’ trope turned into the discovery of a vague Native ancestor, but for Flora that wasn’t enough—she needed to be Indian. When Tookie discovers that Flora died while reading, her curiosity is peaked. Tookie believes in the power of words and books, as she credits books for saving her life, both during her incarceration and after, as in her work as a bookseller she sees the impact books have on her community during the pandemic and protests. As Tookie pieces together why Flora haunts the store, she begins to believe words also have the power to kill. She discovers that Flora died reading a book accounting the horrors inflicted on an Indigenous woman after the Dakota War. Erdrich uses this book and the mystery of its contents to show how Tookie would rather bury her fears than work through them, while also illustrating how the atrocities committed against Native people during the Dakota war extended beyond the battlefield and into the structural systematic oppression that still plagues the country.
Once the pandemic is introduced, the novel takes on a different tone as the characters are learning to manage paranoia while trying to find normalcy. The pandemic takes on a ghostly presence: “it felt like anything and everything might kill you. It was spectral, uncanny. Deadly but not. It was terrifying. It was nothing.” Tookie entered the pandemic in a less than ideal mental space as she tried to manage her inner demons and Flora’s ghost without the support of her friends and family for fear they wouldn’t understand. Once they entered quarantine, the physical isolation and disruption of routine pushed her closer to a breaking point. As The Sentence is part of the early wave of pandemic fiction, the experiences and sentiments the characters experience during this time are all too familiar, but Erdrich succeeds in utilizing the situation to build on the emotional depth of her characters.
This narrative is shaken up again by the murder of George Floyd and the anger and grief that the characters and the city experience as they reckon with the systematic racism in America and want to make a stand to bring about change. Early in the book, Tookie reflects on the idea that “our state’s beginning years haunt everything: the city’s attempts to graft progressive ideas onto its racist origins, the fact that we can’t undo history but are forced to either confront or repeat it,” and more often than not it seems we’re faced with the latter. Tookie reflects on the murder of Philando Castile, the many Indigenous people the police beat or murdered without witness or retribution, and the bloodshed in the Dakota War because with every instance of systematic racism, it’s never just one death. It’s the painful reminder of those who came before, the reminder that things haven’t changed, and that if no one acts it will happen again.
While on the surface, The Sentence is a story about a woman and her ghost, it is so much more, as Erdrich masterfully explores the complexities of timely social issues. Through Tookie’s exploration of these issues in correlation with the past and her own trauma, this novel illustrates the multifaceted ways we are all haunted— perhaps not by spirits— but by ourselves, which is often the most terrifying ghost.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Uncanny Hauntings: A Review of Louise Erdrich's The Sentence
FICTION REVIEW
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