The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

It's difficult not to fall in love with a novel so firmly rooted in a love of books. Tookie, the protagonist of “The Sentence”, works in a Minneapolis bookshop. She's established a relatively stable life after extending her teenage habits into her 30s and serving time in prison for a bizarre crime. But her peaceful days are disturbed when a deceased customer named Flora starts haunting the bookshop. The specific sounds and messy habits of this woman were well known to Tookie so she's immediately able to identify whose invisible presence is browsing the bookshelves. Flora was a well-meaning and open-hearted individual who frequently spent time in the shop, but she possessed the “wannabe” characteristic of a white woman who likes to imagine she possesses Native American heritage. While raising a problematic attitude connected with liberal white society, this is also a playful and ingenious narrative twist on a familiar outdated trope of American storytelling which frequently invoked Indigenous stereotypes for the sake of comedy or horror – i.e. the common reference of “Indian burial grounds” in ghost stories. Tookie also frequently pokes fun at the pointed reasons which bring customers into the shop. Not only does this novel reference a lot of recent literature from Ferrante's “The Days of Abandonment” to “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” but it also includes idiosyncratic lists of books from 'Short Perfect Novels' to 'Tookie's Pandemic Reading'. In a way, this makes the experience of reading Erdrich's novel feel simply like a conversation with a fellow book lover. 

There's an easygoing familiarity to the characters whose daily trials we follow alongside Tookie's supernatural storyline. She comes into possession of the book Flora died reading and it might be cursed. The process of dispelling Flora's spectral presence is connected to this artefact which provides a new view of Indigenous history. However, this central part of the narrative becomes more of a side note when world events take over. Erdrich has stated in interviews how she wrote this novel “in real time” so when the pandemic hits it dominates the story as does the shocking occurrence of George Floyd's murder and the protests which ensue. This makes the narrative feel somewhat like a jostling ride or a lockdown diary. Other novels from Ali Smith's “Summer” to Sarah Moss' “The Fell” have been based around the pandemic, but incorporated the fact of it more intrinsically into the story. In Erdrich's novel it jumps in abruptly. Though part of me wished for more cohesion and a neater arc I appreciated how this made a suitably open-ended tale which captures the ongoing uncertain nature of our times. It also carries on political themes which can be seen throughout the novel and shows how history is an ongoing story. I guess that's another reason why this book feels more like it's opening a dialogue rather than creating a self enclosed narrative. It makes me highly conscious of the fact that any novel that begins in late 2019 will have to wrestle with the fact of the coming pandemic or comment upon it in some way. 

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

Last year I read Louise Erdrich’s novel “LaRose”. It's the first book I’ve read by Erdrich. One of the things I found fascinating about it was the mixture of styles she uses and how one story line is quite fantastical/surreal where a pair of characters are continually chased by a decapitated head. So I was interested to find out how she would write about a future-set dystopian landscape in her new novel “Future Home of the Living God” where evolution reverses. People and animals start giving birth to more primitive beings so it’s like nature is winding back to some earlier genetic code. What follows is a suspenseful tale of society’s breakdown where pregnant women are sequestered as the rogue government desperately tries to discover why the next generation has this primitive condition. Readers will naturally liken this story to “The Handmaid’s Tale” for the way it explores through one woman’s perspective the way women’s bodies are controlled and used by a fascist regime. It definitely has those elements, but it reminded me more of Megan Hunter’s recent post-apocalyptic literary novel “The End We Start From” for the way it explores the meaning of family in a time of crisis. Erdrich succeeds on giving a compellingly new take on these issues as well as raising intriguing questions about faith, nationality, race and biology.

The story is told from the perspective of Cedar, a woman in her early thirties who is pregnant and writes this account to her unborn child (even though she fears her child could be born as a being too primitive to be able to read/understand it.) Cedar was raised by a white couple who adopted her and decides to go meet her birth mother for the first time in order to know if there are any genetic conditions that she and her unborn baby should know about. Since her birth mother is a Native American who lives on a reservation this also gives her an opportunity explore the heritage she’s had little contact with. Soon after, news starts coming in about women giving birth to primitive beings. With the central government’s collapse, society fragments into different factions and Cedar goes into survivalist mode. It also becomes necessary for her to go into hiding because all pregnant women are being seized by officials. Tension steadily builds over the course of the story – not only because Cedar fears being captured, but because the reader wonders what the baby will be born like as her pregnancy progresses.

It felt confusing at some points of the story as I didn’t quite understand who was in charge of the country amidst the crisis, why women were being so forcibly corralled and what was happening in larger society. But Erdrich eludes having to create a laboriously detailed picture of the broader scenario she’s created by telling it all through Cedar’s limited second-person narrative. Cedar herself understands little of what’s going on, the internet and phones have stopped working and she’s only desperately trying to survive/give birth to her baby. It’s commented that “The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don't know what is happening.” So, while this story gets a bit unwieldy in some parts as it feels like the author could have gone into a lot more detail, the bulk of the narrative is a meditative account on Cedar’s part as she contemplates the meaning of motherhood and heritage.

Cedar also naturally considers the meaning of what's happening and broader issues concerning the development of human history. The story provokes an interesting look at the state of our current world as society struggles with issues of over-population, depletion of resources and large-scale environmental disaster. It's been said by some scientists that our intelligence as humans might have given us a temporary evolutionary advantage to become top of the food chain, but this could be a short-term aberration because in the long run its more primitive species which have the ability to survive over millennia: `'Dinosaurs lasted so much longer than we have, or probably will, yet their brains were so little. Meaning that stupidity is a good strategy for survival? Our level of intelligence could be a maladaptation, a wrong turn, an aberration.” So that evolution winds backward in this story might be a way of nature correcting our unfettered domination of the planet. Cedar contemplates how faith and artistic expression figure into our survival as a species and at one point surmises “I think we have survived because we love beauty and because we find each other beautiful. I think it may be our strongest quality.” The story creates a space in which to thoughtfully consider all these issues and how the choices we make will impact future generations.

A newspaper has previously remarked that “Erdrich is the poet laureate of the contemporary Native American experience.” This story also fascinatingly engages with issues of a reservation and how society's fragmentation allows the Native Americans on this reservation to reclaim land that originally belonged to their ancestors. So the novel also makes a wry social commentary on how such regression might allow an opportunity to correct the wrongs of past generations. Cedar herself grapples with feelings about her heritage and where she fits in society. Her journey through the oppressive circumstances of this story gives an interesting perspective on the propensity for violence within our species: “I know this: there is nothing that one human being will not do to another. We need a god who sides with the wretched.” This is a suspenseful, thought-provoking novel.

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is one of those well regarded American authors I’ve always meant to read, but never got around to. When I was sent a copy of “LaRose” I thought I’d dip in to see what her writing style was like. The story had me instantly hooked! It begins with a terrible hunting accident within a Native American community. A man named Landreaux accidentally shoots his neighbour/friend Peter Ravich’s young boy. To compensate for the loss he’s caused and in keeping with his tribe’s tradition, he offers his equally young son LaRose to Peter and his wife Nola to compensate him for his loss. There follows an emotionally complex series of events as the Ravich family struggle with their real son’s loss and Landreaux’s family adjusts to living without LaRose. Meanwhile the boy is caught in the middle. This extraordinary drama raises questions about the meaning of family, guilt and the role traditional Native American beliefs, practices and history play in modern day life making this a deeply engaging novel.

Erdrich has a special ability for writing compelling three-dimensional characters who stick with you. Peter’s wife Nola is a strict Catholic and a hardened woman with self destructive tendencies. The way that she and her strong wilful teenage daughter Maggie play against each other is wholly believable. They are combative characters that find themselves united by love in moments of real crisis. At one point Nola looks at her daughter and realizes “She had raised a monster whom she hated with all the black oils of her heart but whom she also loved with a deadly confused despair.” This compellingly conflicted relationship plays out in a way which shows deep layers of hidden emotions.

The unorthodox Father Travis is a fascinating individual who formerly served in the military. He finds that “Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.” Now he takes an active role in recruiting converts by trawling bars to preach to the most vulnerable and running a drug/alcohol rehabilitation group. Romeo Putay lives on the margins of the community, skimming prescription drugs off from the sick and elderly to use or sell at a profit. He also hoards discarded information to later leverage a sense of power over those he believes have wronged him. The story of his difficult childhood and orphaned life alongside Landreaux is particularly memorable. Romeo’s son Hollis has been raised by his former friend Landreaux adding another dimension to the sense of improvised family units and loose support networks formed to bring together a suffering community.

The individuals living on the Native American reservation in Erdrich’s novel engage in a self conscious struggle with problems that affect their community. A friend of Landreaux’s teaches Ojibwe culture and “Going up against demons was Randall’s work. Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now? Why so much fucked-upness wherever you turned?” The overall portrait is of a people strengthened by their traditions, but hampered by years of being inhibited by institutions that have slighted them and a history of oppression. Romeo has a conversation in a bar with his son Hollis where the teenager remarks about their people “When we fuck up now, we mostly fuck up on our own” to which Romeo replies “Are you crazy! That’s called intergenerational trauma, my boy!” The common problems of their people can’t simply be changed by personal willpower because they are the result of many years of systematic abuse and a conscious effort to eradicate their culture.

Writer L. Frank Baum once wrote: "The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."

Within the novel Erdrich recounts the shocking fact of author L. Frank Baum’s chequered journalist past where he advocated for the extermination of Native Americans. I had never heard of his outrageous assertions but subsequently read about it in this NPR article and in other sources. Erdrich also incorporates elements of Native American folklore into her story in the form of a particularly unsettling and surreal section about a teenager named Wolfred who flees with a girl who is sold into slavery by her own mother, but the pair are continuously followed by the head of Wolfred’s boss Mackinnon in a way which is terrifying. These fantastical elements add a layer to the novel’s underlying messages about issues to do with guilt and possession which saturate the entire culture.

Erdrich’s way of writing about tricky moral dilemmas and very sympathetic characters reminds me of the excellent Canadian writer Joan Barfoot. She looks at complex issues and tests how they play out in extreme situations. I hope to read more of Erdrich’s acclaimed work based on the strength of this novel. “LaRose” is an absorbing and utterly fascinating read.