Erdrich's story starts in a slapstick crime mode, reminiscent of the novels of Elmore Leonard. For Erdrich, these strange times call for a ghost story that sometimes shifts into social realism: specifically, into an account of the first months of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd.Īn absorbing and unquiet novel, The Sentence, like the era we're living through, keeps us readers on the alert for the next improbable turn of events looming ahead of us. The Sentence is part of a vanguard of fall fiction - by writers as disparate as Jodi Picoult, Gary Shteyngart, and Michael Connelly - that tries to capture a splintering America during this long pandemic moment. The Sentence: It's such an unassuming title (and one that sounds like it belongs to a writing manual) but, Louise Erdrich's latest is a deceptively big novel, various in its storytelling styles ambitious in its immediacy.
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