I just know I am not going to be able to do this book justice because I suspect I did not fully grasp the topic matter and all its implications, but I will review it anyway because I enjoyed it very much and want to recommend it heartily, and so will crave my reader’s forbearance.
Our protagonist is Tookie, of the Potawatomi clan. The title refers to both her prison sentence which she served for abducting a dead body which was used to peddle drugs (though she did not know about the drugs, and had abducted the body out of love for a friend who begged her to), and also a sentence from a book which supposedly killed an avid reader and who continues to haunt Tookie at the bookshop where she works. Flora is the ghost, who once had been an annoying but excellent customer, who avidly wanted to be an Indigenous person although she was white, who tried to claim some Indigenous ancestry or any kind of link at all she could manage, who in life was persistent and self delusional and yet generous, caring, good-hearted. In death, she seems to have taken up haunting Tookie at the bookshop, and even trying to possess her. Some of her colleagues witness some of the haunting, and they suppose it is because Flora’s spirit was not yet at rest.
There are two key charms about this novel – one, the kind of consciousness of Tookie and other Indigenous people, their lifestyles, their experiences, their values, their sense of identity, their cultural practises; and two, the many injections of book talk in the novel, given Tookie works in a bookshop and is always trying to match people up with books. This novel contains many passages with lists and lists of authors and books (plus a long list at the end of the book).
The customer liked the mystery writer Louise Penny, so I gushed about Donna Leon. But she also liked history, so I handed over Jacqueline Winspear and John Banville. Little questioning changed the trajectory, I extolled Kate Atkinson and P.D. James, suggested Transcription. She mentioned liking Children of Men. I mentioned The Handmaid’s Tale, which of course she had already read, then I catapulted over to my most special lady, Octavia Butler….” (p65);
She’d made me read Dennis Lehane, Donna Tartt, Stephen Graham Jones, Marcie R. Rendon, Kate Atkinson. She gave me The Death of the Heart and said, “It’s extremely good. Kee it.”” (p203).
Tookie developed her love of reading while in prison, where reading was her escape and sanity.
The novel engages beautifully with how Indigenous people have been abused and continue to be:
Like every state in our country, Minnesota began with blood dispossession and enslavement. […] Our history marks us. Sometimes I think our state’s beginning years haunt everything: the city’s attempts to graft progressive ideas onto its racist origins, the fact that we can’t undo history but are forced to either confront or repeat it” (p72).
Erdrich gives many examples from history of how the indigenous were sold, enslaved, dispossessed, killed, and disrespected. She writes of how white men would steal the corpses of the Indigenous for study or collection or dissection, or else keep the bones of them as trophies, in the past and still to the current day. The novel includes many little stories and instances of the slights and hurts experienced on a daily, casual basis by Indigenous people through misunderstanding or lack of respect or thoughtlessness by others around them, racist discrimination which is seldom called out or so commonplace it is barely remarked upon except amongst Indigenous people to each other.
When the killing of George Floyd sparked off protests, Tookie’s adopted daughter and her husband and her colleague at work all attend to march and protest and otherwise support the protesters. They take it very personally, although it is a black person, but nevertheless, still a minority, and regard it as a tragedy which could and does happen to their own as well.
You rarely hear about police killings of Indigenous people, though the numbers are right up there with Black people, because so often it happens on remote reservations, and the police don’t wear cameras.” (p292).
The relationships between characters also makes lovely reading. Pollux is Tookie’s husband. There is a wonderful, powerful bond between them, but Tookie both loves and needs Pollux while not being able to forgive him. They give each other a lot of space, but are devoted to one another. Tookie also starts to develop a better relationship with her stepdaughter, Pollux’s daughter, Hetta, when Hetta brings her baby to the house, and then they all get locked down together in the pandemic. Their friendships are also interesting, and of a different cultural texture than non-Indigenous friendships – there is a marvellous passage about how they can argue to the point of coming to blows and falling out about wild rice, for example, because wild rice means so much to their people.
Tookie is a strange, feisty character, internally disturbed, intensely loyal, with a huge capacity for loving (but not romance, apparently). She is usually her own worst enemy, except where it comes to books – then it is as if there is another whole facet to Tookie. Her opinions and thoughts on books are intense and intimate, as if her relationship with books:
I needed the writing to have a certain mineral density. It had to feel naturally meant, but not cynically contrived. I grew to dislike manipulations. For instance, besides the repetitive language, my problem with (my now beloved) Elena Ferrante was her use of the winking cliff-hanger. Sometimes I wanted to weep when I detected both talent and abused talent in a writer. The life of the writer cannot help but haunt the narrative (p164).
Erdrich is one of those authors who take the reader to a completely unfamiliar landscape and world, and yet the storytelling is so strong, the reader never feels lost. There are enough markers and explanations provided so that the journey of the story is strong and smooth, and the unfamiliar landscape is decoded beautifully. The novel is an entirely enjoyable read, unusual (to me at least) and well paced even while going into fascinating swirls and eddies here and there without ever losing the strong current forward. Perhaps her style is just what she explained, the life of the author haunting the narrative.
Note: the title of this review is taken from a line in the novel: “Ghosts bring elegies and epitaphs, but also signs and wonders. What comes next?”
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