I’m not sure why it took me so long to read Louise Erdrich. I’ve seen her name on lists of best books in literary journals and other places, and knew that she’d won a Pulitzer Prize, but despite the fact that one of her early novels, Love Medicine, has sat on my shelf for nearly three years, as if waiting patiently for me to chance upon it, I’d not read her. Fortunately, it’s never too late to “discover” an author and be spun off into a new reading universe. My reading future will definitely include many books from Louise Erdrich’s canon.
The Sentence defies easy description. It’s a finely crafted polymorphous novel, part ghost story, part family drama, part redemptive tale, set in Minneapolis during the fractious spring and summer of 2020 when the pandemic raged and George Floyd was murdered by the police. But it’s also about the love of books and words and stories, and the life-altering power of reading.
"I am an ugly woman," the narrator, whose name is Tookie, tells us. “Not the kind of ugly that guys write or make movies about, where suddenly I have a blast of blinding instructional beauty. I am not about teachable moments.” Tookie is self-aware, probably because of her years in prison, which is where she begins her story, recounting how she was sentenced to 60 years for stealing a body. Though admittedly guilty, there are mitigating circumstances, not that it matters to the sentencing judge. Tookie is claustrophobic and so terrified of confinement that she tries to kill herself by tearing up her prison-issued paper clothing and stuffing her nose and mouth. For this she’s placed in the segregation unit for a year, stripped of her books and her precious American Heritage dictionary. She survives solitary confinement by recalling passages from the books she has read.