One has ever to be on guard.” Flora is Tookie’s first warning that being on guard may not be enough.īy 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. 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. Normal is her ideal, where she may “live as a person with a regular life.
More than anything, Tookie craves normal. 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. Because Flora is not the first of Tookie’s ghosts. What Tookie calls herself is another matter. Tookie remembers “how once she had told me I couldn’t talk about being ‘Indian’ or ‘Aboriginal,’ but should always say ‘Indigenous.’ I’d told her that I’d call myself whatever I wanted and to get the hell out of my face.” In life, Flora was a pest who with annoying self-righteousness never stopped wanting to be a Native American. Set mostly in the year 2020, which itself came to seem haunted as Covid spread and the deaths piled up, this novel restores to us all the messy detail of an almost amnesiac time when, worn down and exhausted, “we skied weightlessly through the days as if they were a landscape of repeating features.”Īt 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. Specifically, she wrote a ghost story, “The Sentence,” and the further you read in this engaging account of what happens after a loyal bookstore patron dies and her ghost refuses to leave the store she loved, the more apt Erdrich’s choice of genre seems. Louise Erdrich spent the time writing a novel.
Some people spent their pandemic confinement learning a new language, refining their cooking skills, increasing their step count or gardening.