Indigenous bookstore haunted by a wannabe

This novel starts out intriguing and fun, with amusing riffs on a wide variety of topics, but in the second half kind of peters out, like the author lost interest somewhat and was already thinking about her next project.

The premise is fun & interesting: the protagonist, Tookie, works in Erdrich’s small, quirky Minneapolis bookstore which is now haunted by the ghost of a recently-deceased wanna-be-Indigenous customer named Flora.

As the novel unfolds, ghostly Flora makes her presence known in all kinds of interesting ways. But she does this so many times that it starts to become – if this is possible – a little boring. In addition, a couple of subplots (1. the Minneapolis protests related to George Floyd’s murder; and 2. events related to Laurent, the father of a kid whose mother is Tookie’s coworker) are never developed fully. They seem to be somewhat left hanging.

I don’t want to sound too negative about the book because Erdrich is really a great writer at the nuts-and-bolts level. Her descriptions are wonderful. Her sentences are varied, energetic, surprising and poetic. This reminds me of Saul Bellow for example, whose stories are no longer very appealing to me (so many variations on the theme of the brilliant, misogynistic intellectual) but he was such a skilled and artful writer that I can pick up any of his books, skip to a page, and quickly find a great paragraph. I’d say the same thing about F. Scott Fitzgerald and now Louise Erdrich.

Also like Bellow, Erdrich is very funny. In her telling, being Indigenous seems to be a very humorous experience, despite all the indignities, persecution, privation etc. of which we’re all well aware. I’m having trouble finding an example to quote because my edition has a characteristic that’s one of my pet peeves, which are increasing as I age (I’m 67) and become more and more of a curmudgeon: the pages are raggedy on the edges rather than smooth and uniform; as a result, it’s not easy to flip through the book looking for a particular passage. Does somebody think this is a luxurious touch that distinguishes the fancy hardcover edition from the plebian paperback edition??

OK, I found a good one. Here’s my sample of Erdrich’s writing style and humor. This is part of the description of Penstemon (“Pen”), one of the many interesting workers who populate the bookstore:

Pen had started working here because she had developed obsessions with female authors, alive and dead, and was having a May-December romance with Isak Dinesen’s stories. In the beginning, she told me that she intended to get a Mount-Rushmore-style tattoo of her favorite female authors on her chest. Clarice, Octavia, Joy. She was debating Isak Dinesen, Zitkala-Sa, Susan Sontag. I thought this was a ridiculous so I confused her by extolling Marguerite Duras. Would she choose Duras’s young face from “The Lover” or her sexy ravaged face from thereafter? At last I told her the whole thing would make sex uncomfortable. Who wants to be confronted with four pairs of eyes in bed?

“You’re not going to have sex at all with grandmas peeking up over your dodooshag,” called Jackie from the office.

“What makes you think I have sex on my back?” said Pen.

“And think about what time does to the bosom,” I said in a prim voice. “By the time you’re sixty they’ll all look like “The Scream”.

The book may make you want to visit Erdrich’s bookstore in Minneapolis. You won’t be disappointed. Visiting Birch Bark Books is a wonderfully meditative experience (for one thing, they’re usually playing Indigenous music) while at the same time being quirky & funny. Somehow a book that seems mildly interesting in Barnes & Noble, when encountered in Birch Bark Books seems VERY interesting. Be sure to check out the vintage confessional booth in the middle of the store. It’s hard to miss. If you pass through Minneapolis and like Erdrich and/or bookstores, you MUST visit Birch Bark Books!