Who doesn’t like a good ghost story?
Louise Erdrich takes a ghostly tale into the realm of humor with her latest enchanting novel, “The Sentence,” the story of a woman named Tookie who is haunted by the spirit of an annoying former customer of the bookstore where she works.
Why the ghost chose Tookie as a medium seems problematic at first. Our only conclusion can be that when Tookie agreed to haul the body of Budgie for her friends Mara and Danae, she may have opened a door to the spirit world. Incidentally, Budgie’s body was harboring something that later landed Tookie in prison – no thanks to her supposed friends.
After her early release from prison, Tookie finds a job in a bookstore ironically owned by an author named Louise. Tookie soon finds herself haunted by the ghost of Flora, a wannabe Native she found just as annoying in real life as she was in the afterlife. As Erdrich describes it, “Five days after Flora died, she was still coming to the bookstore.”
As Tookie sets out to exorcise the ghost of Tookie, she deals with a gauntlet of challenges, including the COVID pandemic that nearly claims her gentleman friend Pollux, and the George Floyd murder and subsequent riots that come close to claiming the bookstore where she works.
Even worse, Flora’s use of Tookie as her medium even becomes violent.
“I felt the shark-fin edge of her hand sink into my back. The shock of it didn’t register as pain until her fingers flexed beneath my shoulder blades and gripped me from inside. Then, oh god. She was prying at my body. She was pulling my shoulders apart. She tried to press aside my spine. I fought against her hand like a fish on a hook.”
Tookie eventually determines that Flora’s haunting was the result of her inability to finish a book she was reading. Flora died in mid-sentence, hence the double entendre of the title. Tookie ultimately learns some interesting facts about Flora’s ancestry that help her send her on her way.
Erdrich masterfully holds the reader with an intoxicating cocktail of pathos and humor, an interesting departure from her more serious fiction.
Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa of North Dakota and lives in Minnesota where she owns Birchbark Books. Her novel, “The Night Watchman,” won the Pulitzer Prize.
Michael Tidemann writes from Estherville, Iowa. His Facebook page is available at Author Michael Tidemann.