“Hotels were disturbed by Indians whose bones lay underneath the basements and floors-a neat psychic excavation of American unease with its brutal history. In The Sentence she reverses the terms of the haunting-with commentary from Tookie, who remarks that “unquiet Indians” are an old story in American fiction. At the close of The Night Watchman (2020) she imagines the museums of Washington, DC, as the sites of ghostly parties, storage rooms and exhibits packed and lively with the Indigenous undead. But ghosts and spirits also recur in her fiction, maybe because she knows as well as any American writer where the nation’s bodies are kept.

Now she returns to the store as a ghost, hanging around the Indigenous fiction and poetry sections, ignoring Tookie’s hints to leave.Įrdrich’s great gift is for creating fully realized, fully human characters in complex and satisfying relation to one another. In life Flora was a wannabe, a white person who believed she had Native ancestry. Then one day, in November 2019, Tookie’s least beloved customer, Flora, is felled by a sentence: on reading a specific line in a mysterious manuscript, she dies instantly of horror. Fast forward several years, and she is a middle-aged bookstore clerk in Minneapolis, pressing her beloved authors-Leslie Marmon Silko, Amitav Ghosh, Octavia Butler, Proust-onto potential readers. Tookie becomes a reader in prison, so the novel’s title refers not only to her incarceration but to the words she devours and the sentences she learns to love. its hissing sibilants and double n’s, this repetitive bummer of a word made of slyly stabbing letters that surrounded an isolate human t.” Her American Heritage Dictionary seems appropriately titled, especially when she tells us that Native Americans are “the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned.” She looks up the word sentence and stares miserably at “its yawning c, belligerent littleĮ’s. The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich, Harper, 386 pages, $28.99Īt the beginning of The Sentence, Louise Erdrich’s darkly funny and wickedly brilliant new novel, an Ojibwe woman named Tookie faces a long prison term for illegally transporting a dead body.

The sentence a novel