Review: A ghost haunts Native bookstore in Erdrich’s latest
Associated Press“The Sentence,” by Louise Erdrich When she isn’t writing bestselling novels that explore Native American life, Louise Erdrich runs a bookstore in Minneapolis that sells Native literature and art. Tookie credits her somewhat head-spinning transformation to “the most important skill I’d gained in prison… how to read with murderous attention” — a talent that also lands her a job at a Native-run bookstore that bears a striking resemblance to Erdrich’s own Birchbark Books. But it often feels as if she has written three or four separate sagas — a bookseller’s memoir, a family drama centered on Tookie, Pollux and their adopted daughter; a convoluted, overly symbolic ghost story; and a diaristic account of the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown and aftermath of Floyd’s murder — and smushed them together in one novel. According to the epigraph, from the Minneapolis-based Korean American poet Sun Yung Shin, “From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence.” If that is true, then “The Sentence” still deserves consideration because notwithstanding its flaws, it is an inextricable part of this brilliant writer’s “one long sentence” and life’s work.
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