As Louise Erdrich’s new novel begins, her heroine, Tookie, has been sentenced to 60 years in prison for an offence both horrible and ridiculous. It’s 2005, and though Tookie is in her 30s, “I still clung to a teenager’s pursuits and mental habits” – drinking and drugging as though she is still an impulsive young adult. Her friend Danae’s lover Budgie has died in the arms of his ex, Mara; Danae persuades Tookie to steal a delivery truck in order to snatch Budgie’s body back. The judge who sends her away to a Minnesota jail is shocked by her crime; Tookie, however, is not surprised by his harshness. “I was on the wrong side of the statistics. Native Americans are the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned,” she says.
But while in prison, books are her salvation. Even when she is not permitted to have them, she calls up a library in her head: “everything from the Redwall books to Huck Finn to Lilith’s Brood”. So when she is unexpectedly released in 2015 – her sentence commuted thanks to the tireless efforts of her tribe’s defence lawyer – it is perhaps unsurprising that she finds a job in a Minneapolis bookshop. And here this powerful, endearing novel takes a swerve from its Orange Is the New Black-style opening. It is not Tookie’s term in the savage American carceral system that is the true focus of the book, but her life after her release – a life as ordinary and extraordinary as any, delineated with the care and political acumen that have always distinguished Erdrich’s work, and which won her the Pulitzer prize for her last novel, The Night Watchman.
