There are some books that seem to capture a collective trauma perfectly. This book is the perfect American pandemic story. I’d like to say, no notes. But of course I have notes.

It’s a ghost story set in a Minneapolis book store with a focus on indigenous literature. It starts on All Souls Day of 2019 and ends on All Souls Day of 2020. All of that is pretty well established in the front matter, but even so the perfection of this setting comes as a kind of unfolding surprise. Erdrich tends to write about Native issues in the Minneapolis area, so this setting feels quite natural in one of her books. Yet as the year progresses and her characters encounter first the pandemic and then the Floyd shooting, it becomes only too clear that no one else could capture this exact moment quite so elegantly.

Ghost stories are about resolving unfinished business, and this one is no different. It’s first and foremost a mystery of genealogy and identity, issues of undying import to Native Americans. The ghost is not a mere superstition to be scoffed at, but a serious problem to address, a difficult and vexing problem that even well-intentioned people don’t quite know how to handle. It’s not entirely unlike the pandemic or systemic racism, except that this story has an ending, and the ghost eventually moves on. Balanced against the presence of the ghost is a newborn, and apparently quite a charming one. There is an implicit cyclicality to the narrative, though the end of one story overlaps somewhat messily with the beginning of the next.

The power of the written word is a serious force in this story, no less so than the power of ghosts. That should come as no surprise in a book whose title is The Sentence and whose setting is a bookstore, of course. Sentences, both the ones written in books and the ones handed down by judges, have the power to do serious damage. But they also have a redemptive possibility, they hold out the promise of justice. Perhaps most importantly are these two sentences, taken from a dictionary definition, elegant in their simplicity: “The door is open. Go.” They turn out to be just what the ghost needs.

There is also a bit of self-reference in the narrative, with the author appearing a couple of times in the story, and the setting modeled on her own real-world bookstore in Minneapolis. In general I find self-referential narratives to be a bit annoying or shoddily done, but in this work I find it charming, of a piece with all the other charming characters. Pollux, in particuar, is a peaceful and calming presence, not perfect exactly but a wonderful sidekick.

There is much to be admired and enjoyed about this book, but it closes with a series of book recommendations - ostensibly curated by the main character - which are themselves worth the sticker price of the whole book. I may well devote myself to the list of “short perfect novels” because it seems so perfectly correct.