Throughout it all, she continues to pack up and mail out books, hoping the store will survive.Įrdrich, who won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel "The Night Watchmen," is a master storyteller, rarely content to stay in the mind of only one character at times, in this compressed and urgent timeline, the occasional forays into other perspectives (Pollux’s daughter, a bookstore worker) pull us unwillingly away from Tookie’s journey. Long-held wounds – a marital conflict, the Standing Rock protests, the genocide of her people – threaten to overtake Tookie. Her husband Pollux, a Tribal police officer, and his daughter (once estranged, now living with them) are caught up in the emotional fray. Ensuing sorrow, outrage, and Black Lives Matter protests engulf Minneapolis, and Tookie’s story. Then the novel deepens further, darkens: the coronavirus arrives, and George Floyd is murdered. Tookie worries there is unfinished business for Flora, which may have to do with her fraught ownership of a 19th-century Native captivity narrative.
We learn about the bookstore’s bothersome ghost: Flora, a devoted customer who while alive – as a white woman – craved approval from Tookie and her “fellow Indigenes.” Now Flora’s ghost won’t leave, knocking over displays and splaying books. Louise Erdrich’s 'The Night Watchman' is a rich novel of Native American family, community Here a reader might wonder if "The Sentence" is on-trend autofiction, but in fact, the novel, in which “Louise” registers only occasionally, is more sidelong and interesting. In fact, exactly like that one, and where “Louise” interviews and hires her. These elements inform both the story and the telling of "The Sentence." Tookie finds her ideal job at a Minneapolis bookshop, a small independent store not unlike the one Erdrich owns in real life. In our own Anishinaabewomin, it includes intricate forms of human relationships and infinite ways to joke.” It’s a pleasure to spend time inside the singular mind of Tookie as narrator, a prickly and devoted Ojibwe woman: “Even though most of us don’t speak our Native languages, many of us act out of a handed-down sense of that language.
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