The Sentence
by Louise Erdrich
Pollux kissed my hair and closed the bedroom door. He knew that sometimes I needed to retreat. I crawled naked into our king-size bed with the foam topper and the mattress pad pulled down over the foam. With carefully chosen pillows from the discount pillow store. With cheap white, but ever so white, sheets and pillowcases. When I creep into our bed, there is the joy and relief of a person entering a secret dimension. Here I shall be useless. The world can go on without me. Here I shall be held by love.
Who hasn’t, at one point or another, responded to the seemingly relentless pandemic in this way? I know I have. Let me repeat it….Here I shall be useless. The world can go on without me. Here I shall be held by love. In The Sentence, Louise Erdrich captured a host of pandemic moments which both reflected and expanded my own experience. My first thought, on reading the book summary was ‘too soon! too soon!” Aren’t writers supposed to wait a time after the event, to absorb, process and find meaning? Aren’t they supposed to take months, even years of reflection and craft it into a story that invokes memories?
The miracle of Erdrich’s latest novel is that she did all of that in the midst of the crisis. She tracked not only the pandemic but also the Minneapolis-based events of George Floyd’s death, it seemed, in real time. It was a weird experience watching the slow unfolding, in a handful of lives, of something that I also, had recently experienced, and yet in a completely different way. I kept saying to myself “I wonder when this is going to happen. Or that?”
Erdrich brought me into the setting of her own small bookstore, rendered herself the owner, and played out the pandemic in the lives of her employees. I was invited into one experience of Indigenous people, one experience of a person of color and even the bizarre experience of a ghostly presence. What happened to these people was indeed a microcosm of what happened to us all. An inability to believe in the encroaching threat. The uncertainty of it’s potential. The adjustment of even the smallest details of life (What is safety? Who should live where? What will we eat? How long?) that reverberated around the world.
Erdrich wove throughout, the suffering of the disenfranchised, the quantum weight of that suffering in times of extreme distress, and the hope of finding healing in connection.
This story has its mysteries and its loves. Comfortable love shaken, and confusing love sorted out. But it seems the greatest love is the protagonist (Tookie’s) love of books.
Threaded throughout the story is a “survival” list of her favorites. Now that alone is worth the price of the book. Because, while there are many coping tools available, in any crisis, I know for me books are always at the top of the list. Here’s a summary of the categories:
Ghost-Managing Books
Short Perfect Novels
Sailboat Table (you’ll have to read the book to get it)
Books for Banned Love
Indigenous Lives
Indigenous Poetry
Indigenous History and Nonfiction
Sublime Books
Tookie’s Pandemic Reading
Incarceration (Yes, there’s a reason. Again, you’ll have to read it)
As I move into my own transition to “post-pandemic” life, I also am experiencing and affirming for myself that the healing will be in human connection.