Louise Erdrich: 'The Sentence"

"It was thrilling to be carried along the streets, scant notion where I was going, into neighborhoods inhabited by surprising people. Women in billowing fuchsia robes and purple head scarves roamed the sidewalks. I saw Hmong people, Eritrean people. Mexican. Vietnamese. Ecuadorian. Somali. Laotian. And a gratifying number of Black American people and my fellow Indigenes. Store signs in languages with flowing script and then mansion after mansion—spruced up, decaying, chopped up, gated under floating canopies of trees. Then abandoned areas—train yards, acres of paved fields, dystopic malls. Sometimes I’d see a tiny restaurant I liked the look of so I’d get off at the next stop and go inside, order soup. I took a tour of world soups. Avgolemono. Sambar. Menudo. Egusi with fufu. Ajiaco. Borscht. Leberknödel suppe. Gazpacho. Tom yam. Solyanka. Nässelsoppa. Gumbo. Gamjaguk. Miso. Pho ga. Samgyetang. I kept a list in my diary, with the price of the soup next to each name. All were satisfyingly cheap and very filling." Louise Erdrich. The Sentence (pp. 29-30).   

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is a magnificent book with a vivid character at the center. Her personality and that of Minneapolis, where the book takes place, are linked in many ways, as illustrated in the above quotation. I read this book in less than 24 hours because I couldn't stop. Five things I loved about the novel: 

1. The incredible portraits of Tookie, the central character, and her husband Pollux. Erdrich deeply explores the Indigenous identity of Tookie and other characters with native-American backgrounds and experiences. In addition, there's family life, especially the description of the first year of life of Pollux's grandson Jarvis.
2. The depiction of the 2020 pandemic: the author shows the impact of the pandemic on Tookie, her friends, her family, and her community, making this a very relatable book.
3. The impact of George Floyd's death: the characters' first-hand accounts bring to life the Minneapolis demonstrations over police violence in the summer of 2020.
4. A believable ghost story: a real ghost appears in the bookstore where Tookie works. Plus the ghosts of pandemic victims: "The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world." (p. 364). 
5. Food: the food and food prep descriptions show how food and love combine in the characters' lives. Food integrates with identity, beyond just specific ethnic food choices. For example, wild rice, being native to the Indigenous people in the novel, has many meanings. Even the ghost is involved in culinaria: Tookie sees her "messing around in the Cookbook section—I was pretty sure ghosts missed the taste of food." (p. 354). 

These themes all combine into a great story about a family, a community, a bookstore, the pandemic, and cataclysmic events in Minneapolis. We all know the events in Minneapolis from reading newspapers, but that the novel turns them into a story about individual experiences. 

George Floyd as later portrayed at the site of his death, Cup Foods in Minneapolis.
In the novel, Tookie described her first reaction on learning of the event: 
"Then I watched it too, the video of a police officer with his knee on the neck
of a Black man who cried out and cried out for his mother and then went quiet and then
was silent. This happened at Cup Foods in South Minneapolis. Pollux often stopped there
to pick up a thing or two on his way back from working on the universe.
You can get anything there, and I mean anything, he said about Cup." (p. 235).

Erdrich's masterful writing also includes a huge number of food and cooking passages: my favorite type of description. While Tookie bakes cookies and cooks fish, the most memorable food passages tell how Pollux cooks for her, and how food expresses their affection and closeness. Pollux prepares both original recipes and native dishes, such as a special potato salad recipe made with bacon and hot pickles. 

Here are a few examples of how Pollux cooks for Tookie:

"He sat me down, and told me not to move until he made me a fried egg sandwich with green chilis. He would make it on an oversized toasted English muffin. ...

"‘What’s crazy is how good this sandwich was,’ I said, staring at my empty plate. 

"‘Split another?’ 

"‘It would be my honor. Let me help you by talking to you while you make it.’" (p. 94-95). 

***

"Pollux called out. ‘I’m making your scorched corn soup recipe, remember?’" ...

"For the past year, Pollux has been perfecting my favorite soup ...—it is a corn soup. First he caramelizes fresh-cut sweetcorn, toasting it slowly in a heavy pan, adding onions. Then cubed potatoes tossed lightly in butter, to set a crisp. He adds all of this to a garlicky chicken broth with shaved carrots, cannellini beans, fresh dill, parsley, a dash of cayenne, and heavy cream. The scent was making me delirious." (p. 105-106)

***

"There was a delicious scent. Pollux was browning chunks of squash with onions and garlic. Maybe he would make some sort of spicy curry." (p. 121).

***

"Turtle Mountainers are big on New Year’s and we were having open house at Louise’s. The day would be celebrated with a meatball soup called boulettes or bullets, and small bites of frybread called bangs. If the night was warm, we’d sit around an outside fire. Pollux made the bangs because he knows how to work with hot grease, while I’m an expert on cold grease. I brought Old Dutch potato chips." (p. 127).

Wild rice, or manoomin, is very important to Tookie and Pollux, and to their friends, who have arguments about which types are best. But it's agreed that: "Real wild rice is grown wild, harvested by Native people, and tastes of the lake it comes from.  ... Native people around here have a specific ferocity about wild rice. I’ve seen faces harden when tame paddy rice, the uniformly brown commercially grown rice, is mentioned, called wild rice, or served under false pretenses." (pp. 105-106). 

The only feature of Erdrich's book that doesn't appeal to me is her long list of her favorite books. Tookie recommends books while doing her job in the bookstore, and in this context, the books help create little portraits of the quirky customers. But Erdrich appends an entire multi-page book list in a chapter at the end (it's not really part of the novel, so this isn't a spoiler). I'm really in favor of loving books as Tookie and her colleagues in the bookstore do, but I found the repeated recommendations to be a little over done: the demand that readers patronize independent bookstores doesn't fit well into a novel, in my opinion. Too much like religion!

Review © 2022 mae sander for mae food dot blogspot dot com.