Her latest novel, Body Tourists, is now available in paperback, and reviewed on this blog (see below). For more information, see Jane's website.
Erdrich is the Pulitzer-prize winning author of no less than
17 novels, and I’m ashamed that I haven’t read one of them till now. The
Sentence, which was on this year’s Women’s Prize shortlist, has sent
me scurrying for her backlist.
Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa,
and owns Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Elements of the novel
are clearly rooted in this biography, since most of the action takes place in a
similar Minneapolis bookstore, which specialises in books by and about
indigenous people. The first person narrator, Tookie, ends up working at the
store, and real Minneapolis comes crashing into the narrative when coronavirus
hits, George Floyd is murdered, and the
city becomes a war zone.
Tookie is a one off; tough, funny, sarcastic, prickly,
thoroughly off the rails (in her early life, at least), and convinced she is
unlovable. She reminds me a little of the cranky heroine/narrator of Olga
Tokarczuk’s magnificent Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. (One
of many books which Tookie recommends to the reader.) Chapter one charts her hilarious route to a
ten year stint in prison for stealing a corpse whilst under the influence of
various drugs and an unrequited passion for a horribly manipulative woman.
In prison she becomes a reader. The book changes tone and
settles down to a steadier kind of story, when she comes out of prison in 2015.
There’s a ghost, Flora, with a complex plot which provides the pretext for increasingly
strange behaviour on Tookie’s part; there are bookstore friends and colleagues;
there is the ever-lovable Pollux, the man who arrested her and eventually
marries her; and all these are expertly drawn. But what fascinated me most
about the novel was the insider view it gave me of Tookie’s Potawatomi
world-view. For her, the veil between the mundane and the supernatural is thin;
she is alert to signs and tokens which mean nothing to me; her cultural
identity means she experiences life differently, and it feels like a great
privilege to be let into that.
Here she is talking about Flora, the customer who has died;
Flora’s stubborn refusal to vanish began to irk me.
Although it figured. She would haunt the store. Flora was a devoted
reader, a passionate book collector. Our speciality is Native books, of course,
her main interest. But here comes the annoying part: she was a stalker – of all
things Indigenous. Maybe stalker is too harsh a word. Let’s say instead that
she was a very persistent wannabe.
As you can see, it’s all in the tone; Tookie’s deadpan
humour and her matter-of-fact honesty.
I’ve mentioned the novel’s plotting and characters, but I
should also flag up its crafts-womanship and poetic skill. The Sentence of the title has multiple meanings, which go
on reverberating right to the end: but I won’t say any more about that. Go
read!
The Sentence is published by Corsair.
Jane Rogers' Body Tourism is reviewed here.
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