The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

This also could have been the title of Jon Fosse’s Septology.

Setting aside my dumb joke, I’m surprised this book hasn’t gotten more readers among this group. Louise Erdrich is a highly respected US novelist. She won the 2012 National Book Award for Round House. And of course just last year she won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for The Nightwatchman.

Something about Erdrich bothers me, but I don’t know what so I have only read one book by her. I want to read this though.

I can't comment on this as I'm judging it for the booktuber prize but my ranking of it is a clue to what I think of the Sentence.

Your question is a good one David.

And it I think shows that your question remains apposite that no one has commented on this book since the day after the longlist announcement. Only the Great Circle - which we did to death in the Booker - has had similarly little discussion across the IB and WP longlists.

I wonder if some of it is that I do not think she is an author that well known outside the US. So while Night Watchman won a Pulitzer in it was hardly reviewed in the literary focused mainstream media here - even in the Guardian/Observer that you think would be a natural home. Similarly for Times, Irish Times, New Statesman, Independent, Evening Standard, FT etc. TLS did review but only a very short one and I can see reviews in Literary review and slightly oddly in the Spectator (by a main Guardian reviewer). I have to confess I had no idea what the book was about.

Not sure why but I wonder if it’s because stories about prejudice against indigenous people don’t seem to really resonate here in the same way that say slavery stories do?

Anyway I have started the book and enjoying its quirkiness so far - I liked the author appearing in the story

That’s all probably true. She is also a beloved bookstore owner in Minnesota so part of her persona here is due to that as well. Aside from her quirky American-ness, she her work seems to be a good fit for this prize, straddling the commercial/literary divide.

It sounds like you’re finding this more promising than the last batch you read.

I don’t know how much press the George Floyd protests received in the UK. They were centered in Minneapolis, where Erdrich lives and has her bookstore.

I am listening to this on Audible and enjoying it well enough. Promising though and unusual. Quirky. Definitely agree. About 20% in so far.

Yes the George Floyd murder is well known

I haven’t read her because I was under the impression that she is like Ferrante, all their books are about their hometown and a specific kind of oppression, so if I read one book, I’d read them all. I also saw her on one of the discover your ancestry shows in which she did a DNA test. She then did not want the results mentioned on the show which led me to believe she does not have the Ojibwe ancestry she has built her literary career around.

I didn’t know her book store was in Minneapolis. I thought she lived in a rural northern town.

I need to read this. People I trust really like her writing and each has a different favorite Erdrich. I’m sure I have the wrong impression of her.

She had a difficult marriage to the writer Michael Dorris until his death.

She slightly trashes Ferrante in this novel

Really?! Why?

Thing about not wanting a DNA test from what I can see seems to be about her family not wanting to have any issues:

In 2010, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asked 12 celebrities to get DNA tests for his television show about genealogy, Faces of America. The novelist Louise Erdrich was the only one to refuse. Erdrich’s maternal grandfather was a chief of the Turtle Mountain Chippewas, a Native American tribe in North Dakota, and Erdrich is also an enrolled member. As Erdrich explained to Gates regarding the DNA test:

"It wouldn’t do me any harm, but when I asked my extended family about this -- and I did go to everyone -- I was told, ‘It’s not yours to give, Louise.’"

Interesting overlap with Phenotypes from the IB in terms of genetic identity/ancestry vs social background vs phenotypes

I think I am enjoying this.

It does sound good

I enjoyed the first half of it or so much more than the back half. Tookie is a good character but it became a bit of a slog for me as too often I felt the “teachiness” was overwhelming the art. But mine seems a less popular opinion, it does seem to be highly praised.

I read this in audio, which seems to be the only way I can read Erdrich. I enjoyed it as I have done all her books I've read in audio. I've never finished one in print, so she joins C.S. Lewis as an author I can only appreciate in audio! But I do think Erdrich is an American treasure. She's first to my mind when it comes to native American authors. I love that she owns a bookstore. I thought she did a great job with Covid and George Floyd. Tookie's a very complex character - very real. My review - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

Erdrich does not always write about Minnesota and Native Americans. The first book I read by her was The Master Butchers Singing Club, which is about post-WWI German immigrants who settle in North Dakota.

I thought she had the DNA test, but after seeing the results declined to have them made public, but memory is unreliable.

I have to chime in here to say how much I enjoyed reading The Sentence for its humor, for the quirky character Tookie, and for the fact that it was the first Pandemic novel I’d read. Also, in Before times, I had the pleasure of visiting her wonderful bookstore. I mean come on, who wouldn’t love a store with a birchbark canoe hanging from the ceiling.
My review
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I thought the book was good on the whole - there were parts I was not so keen on but I think I ended at just about 4*

In a normal year this would be outside my shortlist - albeit I would not object at all to its inclusion - currently its in my top 2 of the 10 I have read (and 1 have started)

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

No mention of the most shocking thing on the thread so far

No not the missed/refused DNA test but the suggestion that she has dared to diss Ferrante.

It’s the characters - particularly a very demanding reader who simply points out the Neapolitan books are soap opera which they are.

I just realized I never posted comments about The Sentence. I read this when it was first published in the US several months ago. I really was excited about it because the premise seemed perfect for me and I had been very impressed with Erdrich's last novel The Night Watchman, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Ultimately, I felt (as Lee said) that the first half was much better than the second half. It was as if the story somehow got away from her a bit. Given how my reading of the longlist is going, this may well wind up in my top half.

GY mentioned the Ferrante diss in message 12. Embedding it in a character’s voice is still a diss, albeit (see what I did, Paul?) a true criticism, as GY said. I loved the Neapolitan quartet and they did feel soap opera-ish at times.

The Neapolitan quartet was pure soap opera. It was a 3* series for me.

Sacrilege.

Well except Coronation Street was a soap opera and it brought us Hilda Ogden, a character whose like literature has seldom matched.

I enjoyed it more than you, I think, Linda, and I can concede that it was soap operaish, but I found it too much a page turner to give it 3 stars. Although it was probably a 3* if I compare it to other books I’ e given 3 stars.

I'm flabbergasted. I gave it 17 stars overall. One of the greatest novels of the 21st century.

LindaJ^ wrote: "The Neapolitan quartet was pure soap opera. It was a 3* series for me."

I'm with you there - at least for My Brilliant Friend, which was all I read.

Greatest novels of the 21st century? It was a page turner and a great story, but greatest novel, I’m not sure about that.

You must be immune to Ferrante Fever, perhaps due to a prior infection by a a similar condition.

I'm enjoying it very much for some reason, at least for now. It's the only one left on the longlist I wanted to read after "Salt Lick" (which was a disaster).

Have you read any of the International Booker, endrju? There may be more on that list that you like.

I've read a couple before the announcement but will turn my attention properly to it after I'm done with "The Sentence". And there's always Lambda...

I enthusiastically loved the quartet, but that was enough immunization for Ferrante fever since her books don’t mutate into other forms. One Ferrante is much like the others.

I liked this a lot, but I agree that the first half was better than the second. The first half promised a kind of coherence that the second half didn't deliver. Still my favourite of the four longlistees I've read so far, though, and I wouldn't be cross to see it shortlisted.

I thought this book was really good! Tookie is a great character. I agree that the middle part lagged a bit and didn’t seem to connect to the overall story but I struggle to see how that could have been improved. She couldn’t write a book set in a year in Minneapolis that included the George Floyd murder but not have it be a big part of the story. Unless there’s another part of the second half that people are talking about?

Suzanne wrote: "I thought this book was really good! Tookie is a great character. I agree that the middle part lagged a bit and didn’t seem to connect to the overall story but I struggle to see how that could have..."

I think for me it's that these themes weren't strongly prefigured in the first half of the novel, which had a closer focus on the bookstore and Tookie's closest relationships (and the ghost!). I liked the BLM segment and I especially appreciated seeing Indigenous reactions to George Floyd's murder and the subsequent protests. It just felt like the story flew apart a bit.

I think that’s a good summary.

I agree. Laura, that’s very much how I felt. I was engaged (although not loving it) during the first half and then felt as though the story went somewhere else entirely and not in a way that made sense to me.

She was writing what she was living. The world was rocked by Covid and then George Floyd tore it apart. And Minneapolis was the epicenter of the George Floyd earthquake, so I think that if the second half "flew apart a bit," well, the world she was writing about did do just that.

That’s a valid point Linda! I read a review (Guardian I think) where they essentially say the same thing - that book is chaotic in the same way the year was chaotic. That makes a lot of sense to me and it fits together more in my head now.

Yes because of course the author is a character in her own book and owns the central location of the book so there is very much a sense of her characters going through her lived experience as she write the book.

Indeed. Quite a good observation and a thought-provoking one. I'm still not sure that it works as a reading experience, at least for this reader, but what having these insights into context does help.

Thank you for this, Cindy, something can make sense in a novel, but it doesn’t make the reading experience better. I’m often conflicted about how to rate a book when I know there is more to the novel than what I’m seeing, this will help me in my reviews. I see what the author was attempting but it didn’t work as a reading experience for me.

I’m midway through the first chapter and can’t stand this. The author is reading the audio and using baby talk for the conversation between the two women. Does this get better? If not, this will be a quick DNF.

LindaJ^ wrote: "She was writing what she was living. The world was rocked by Covid and then George Floyd tore it apart. And Minneapolis was the epicenter of the George Floyd earthquake, so I think that if the seco..."

Very good point, Linda, agree with you on this.

David wrote: "I’m midway through the first chapter and can’t stand this. The author is reading the audio and using baby talk for the conversation between the two women. Does this get better? If not, this will be..."

I had to bail on this one. It may be unfair to judge the audio version when I'm reading most of the others, but the author did this audio so I feel it's a fair judgment.

Absolutely Linda, and I thought the eclecticism of the subject-matter worked very well from this perspective - this stuff all belongs together in a book because it was lived together. But, given this is a novel, I would still have preferred more structural coherence.