I am told that there are quite a few novels that portray the pandemic, and the experience of lockdown, but I hadn’t read one yet (aside from the fleeting references in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet), so it was a new experience for me. Way back in 2008, I was enthralled at how the movie Cloverfield did something completely unlike the typical monster movie by giving you a long (SO long) intro of normalcy that got jarringly interrupted. Similarly, in 2022, I was delighted by how The Sentence wasn’t really a novel about the pandemic, it was a novel that got somewhat taken over by the pandemic, and the George Floyd protests, which is, of course, exactly what that experience was like. Was Erdrich initially planning on writing an entirely different novel? Maybe! But where the glimpses of pandemic in Ali Smith’s books made me think, hmmm, maybe wait awhile to sort through what this experience means before writing about it? The raw immediacy of the The Sentence felt very apropos. It is true, the other parts of the story — particularly the haunting, which, in the initial half, is so gripping — fell by the wayside a bit, or got slightly muddled. But what did come through was a powerful sense of intimacy, community, and connection among various characters, on different levels and registers, that was extremely compelling. There are so many wonderful scenes of comfortable domesticity — to me it seemed like an effective and soothing balm to the frustration of being at home that many people felt (but I imagine for others the hurt might be a bit too raw, yet).
I read The Sentence with two different book clubs, and I sort of expected that there would be a lot of conversation around the pandemic parts, but surprisingly, there was almost none. Instead, we talked about the many different stories the novel contained (too many! some complained. Too outrageous! some said). In addition to the pandemic and the protests, there’s a former convict plotline, working through a traumatic childhood, running away from past mistakes, a haunting (yes, an actual ghost!), a (happy) marriage, reflections on contemporary Indigenous culture and its relationship to tradition, the chaos of a new baby, building a relationship with a step-daughter, various employees and customers of a bookstore… Yes, it’s jam-packed. I will admit that I lost the thread of a few of those plotlines and had to flip back to remind myself what exactly was going on. On the other hand, the people in my bookclubs who didn’t like part of the story noted cheerfully that if one element of the novel wasn’t all that interesting it was fine, because there were plenty of others to choose from. And everyone acknowledged that the prose was so inviting, so engaging, that you found yourself immersed regardless. That said, I still seemed to like it more than pretty much anyone else did.
I maybe loved it an extra bit because the main character works at a bookstore, and it just so perfectly captures what that experience is like. The kind of community to be found there, yes (Jeff Deutsch’s book on this topic, about the very bookstore where I worked! is really great), but especially, the kinds of reading tastes that booksellers develop (aka, the deep and powerful love they cultivate for small and independent presses and literature in translation). OF COURSE there’s a list of perfect short novels in the middle of this book. And of course there is also a series of lists of books at the end. Interestingly, the list at the end is far more political than the novel itself — although I can’t quite imagine someone who was fully on the right-wing, BLM-is-a-terrorist-organization, make-america-great-again bus reading this novel and appreciating it, I do think it makes a real effort to reach out to people who may be somewhere in the middle of these various polarized debates. There are various moments where characters consider how white supremacy affects both African Americans and Indigenous communities, and some pointed remarks about the legal system, but I think that even someone who doesn’t inhabit that viewpoint would admit that the novel doesn’t feel preachy or scolding. It’s a very gentle read, in a lot of ways, but also a very moving one.
Kasia Reads 