A climactic scene in “The Sentence,” for instance, scoops up an earlier image only to repurpose it: “I closed my eyes,” the narrator says, “and in the blackness my tree crashed down, flailing forward. They often shimmer with spirits, and yet their true uncanniness derives from Erdrich’s more classical facility with evocation and character. (Her previous novel “ The Night Watchman” was inspired by her grandfather, an activist and local hero it won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2021.) The books are marked by warmth and patience, and by their protagonists’ sly, rough-edged amiability. Erdrich often writes about the “Indigerati”-her name for urban, intellectual Native Americans-of the Upper Midwest. Powerful, inviting, friendly-these adjectives might describe Erdrich’s own strengths, ramifying across more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, children’s literature, and essays. When, partway through “ The Sentence,” a new novel by Louise Erdrich, a hundred-and-two-year-old tree falls down, the leafy crown looks “powerful,” “inviting.” Characters gather to touch the lichen-spotted bark.
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