And so it is with its fictional counterpart. Birchbark Books describes itself as “a locus for Indigirati – literate Indigenous people who have survived over half a millennium on this continent”.
Erdrich captures the fear and the queasy pleasure of a suddenly deserted metropolis and closed-down lifeĪnd Erdrich not only lives there, but also owns a bookstore very similar to the shop in The Sentence.
Her books always run right up against the politics of the present, and The Sentence has an almost shocking immediacy, set as it is against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, where Erdrich lives. Over the course of her long and distinguished writing career, beginning with the acclaimed Love Medicine in 1984, Erdrich has charted Indigenous lives in the US in a manner that recalls William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: the creation of a fictional universe centred in lived reality and experience. That book was inspired by the life of her own grandfather, tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, who in the 1950s campaigned tirelessly against the US government’s policy of “termination”, through which Native American tribes would be moved off their land, and the land sold. It is not Tookie’s term in the savage American carceral system that is the true focus of the book, but her life after her release – a life as ordinary and extraordinary as any, delineated with the care and political acumen that have always distinguished Erdrich’s work, and which won her the Pulitzer prize for her last novel, The Night Watchman. And here this powerful, endearing novel takes a swerve from its Orange Is the New Black-style opening. So when she is unexpectedly released in 2015 – her sentence commuted thanks to the tireless efforts of her tribe’s defence lawyer – it is perhaps unsurprising that she finds a job in a Minneapolis bookshop. Even when she is not permitted to have them, she calls up a library in her head: “everything from the Redwall books to Huck Finn to Lilith’s Brood”. Native Americans are the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned,” she says.īut while in prison, books are her salvation. “I was on the wrong side of the statistics. The judge who sends her away to a Minnesota jail is shocked by her crime Tookie, however, is not surprised by his harshness. Her friend Danae’s lover Budgie has died in the arms of his ex, Mara Danae persuades Tookie to steal a delivery truck in order to snatch Budgie’s body back. It’s 2005, and though Tookie is in her 30s, “I still clung to a teenager’s pursuits and mental habits” – drinking and drugging as though she is still an impulsive young adult. A s Louise Erdrich’s new novel begins, her heroine, Tookie, has been sentenced to 60 years in prison for an offence both horrible and ridiculous.
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