Some people spent their pandemic confinement learning a new language, refining their cooking skills, increasing their step count or gardening.
At first the ghost of Flora, an elderly customer who dropped dead, haunts only Tookie, the narrator, a middle-aged Native American working in a Minneapolis bookstore that specializes in works about Indigenous people.
She is haunted by her mother’s addiction and death, haunted by a misspent youth and her time in prison, and though she is resilient, she is haunted by the idea that there is something flawed about her — that if there is a way to screw something up, she’ll find it.
A job with regular hours after which I come home to a regular husband.” All she wants is for her life “to continue in its precious routine.
Because at first she alone feels the ghost’s presence, Tookie questions her own sanity.
By the end of the novel, the idea of ghosts has expanded to include those parts of the past that refuse to die because we have refused to process them.
“The Sentence” covers a lot of ground, from ghosts to the joys and trials of bookselling to the lives of Native Americans and inmates doing hard time.
Just as life veers into lockdown, Tookie is riding home with her husband, Chinese takeout perfuming the car as they drive down the dark, “empty, peaceful streets” of Minneapolis.
I want to forget this year, but I’m also afraid I won’t remember this year.” There is something wonderfully comforting in the precise recollection of such furtive memories, like someone quietly opening a door onto a little slice of clarity.
It may be that, as Tookie argues, “books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.” But that harsh judgment notwithstanding, there are books, like this one, that while they may not resolve the mysteries of the human heart, go a long way toward shedding light on our predicaments.