But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean.
This book,
Like many others, I did not see it coming.
But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean.
This book, which follows on closely (both in novel-time and publishing-time) from Oh, William!, begins in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic became - not just a news item from China - but a tsunami that was going to engulf most of the world. It was a strange experience to read this timeline of trauma; it felt both recent, and strangely distant. Coincidentally, I got my fourth vaccine booster the day that I began reading this book, although most people I know seem to think we are now in “post-COVID” time. What does that mean? Perhaps only that we do not fear the disease in the same way, despite the fact that we are just now beginning to properly deal with the financial and emotional fallout.
I suspect that most people who reach for this book are already devoted Lucy Barton - and Elizabeth Strout - fans. When Lucy realises that her entire childhood had been a lockdown - a parallel universe of loneliness, isolation, deprivation and fear - it’s entirely obvious why Strout made the decision to analyse the pandemic through this character’s particular lens.
The plot is admittedly a tick-box of every typical COVID experience, but Strout makes it work. It works because she is the most compassionate of writers. Lucy’s voice - her characteristic way of explaining things to herself, of musing, of connecting the past to the present, of exclaiming (!!) - might cloy under a lesser writer’s control, but Strout manages to make her a supremely loveable person. I use the word “person” deliberately because Lucy doesn’t feel like a character; she feels like a person to me. A dear, dear person.
The storyline takes place mostly in rural Maine, but also in New York City. That contrast is important, and it plays a key role in the plot in a variety of ways. Strout is telling Lucy’s story, but she is also telling the story of the US in the extremely tense and traumatic years of 2020-22. Like the author, Lucy is a writer and she explains her attraction to that profession as a profound curiosity and need to understand other people. If Strout has a project in this book it is exactly that: she wants to get at the combative and entirely opposed points of view that are battling it out in the US right now. If I had to pick one word to describe this book it would be humane. Lucy is like a bridge between the American people who are struggling for a toehold in the American Dream, and those who have reaped the rewards of American opportunity and prosperity.
I have to rate this book a 5; perhaps it will not be an enduring classic, perhaps it doesn’t rank amongst the great works, but Strout is peerless when it comes to creating living characters. I was stunned into quiet reflection after racing my way through Lucy’s experience of the pandemic. ...more
Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.
Though now I could operate an industrial sewing machine and work a printing p
Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.
Though now I could operate an industrial sewing machine and work a printing press, the most important skill I’d gained in prison was how to read with murderous attention.
The book had its own volition and would force me to reckon with it, just like history.
The door is open. Go!
This book, like its title, has meaning on many different levels.
It’s the story of an Indigenous middle-aged woman known as “Tookie”: a wise-cracking former junkie and prison inmate, current bookstore employee and wife to Pollux, avid reader and ace book recommender. When the book begins, Tookie is being haunted by a former customer who died on All Souls Day. Tookie describes Flora as one of her most annoying customers; a “wannabe Indian” during her life, Flora won’t leave Tookie - or the bookstore - alone in her death. She seems to have died while reading a sentence in a rare Indigenous text, and somehow her identity and history is bound up with Tookie’s.
Like every state in our country, Minnesota began with blood dispossession and enslavement. Officers in the U.S. Army bought and sold enslaved people, including a married couple, Harriet Robinson and Dred Scott. Our history marks us. Sometimes I think our state’s beginning years haunt everything: the city’s attempts to graft progressive ideas onto its racist origins, the fact that we can’t undo history but are forced to either confront or repeat it.
During the year that Flora’s ghost haunts Tookie, the city of Minneapolis is first stalked by the COVID epidemic and then haunted by the brutal police killing of George Floyd. It’s unsettling and surreal to read about these very contemporary events within the context of a fictional book, but Erdrich’s main theme of being haunted by the ghosts of the past - and the wounds they caused, or carried - dovetails powerfully with these “real life” cataclysms whose aftershocks are still being felt. I did think the pace of the book got a little uneven when COVID intruded, but there is so much in this book to love - above all, for me, the voice of Tookie - that a bit of uneven pacing didn’t mar the reading experience even a jot.
Avid readers and book lovers will delight in its bookstore setting - which bears more than a passing resemblance to Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis which specialises in Indigenous writing (and is owned by the author). Conversations between Tookie and her customers, and the “Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books” at the back of the book, give this novel bookish bonus points - even though the story would be strong enough without them. Books have saved Tookie’s life, and over and over again this novel makes the point that stories - even when reduced to their basic components of words and sentences - are powerful.
It also seems worth noting that Erdrich dedicates the book to: “Everyone who has worked at Birchbark Books, to our customers, and to our ghosts.”...more
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