With the latter passage in mind, I did fear the worst when Pollux caught Covid and was hospitalized I was as relieved as Tookie when he was discharged.Īlong with Pollux comes his daughter, Hetta, and her baby son Jarvis.
The thing I knew was that if anything happened to Pollux I would die too. I live what can be called a normal life only if you’ve always expected to live such a way.
… I live the way a person does who has ceased to dread each day’s ration of time. A job with regular hours after which I come home to a regular husband. Now I live as a person with a regular life. Their marriage keeps Tookie grounded even when traumatic memories or awful current events rear up. Their relationship is casual and sweet, with lots of banter and a good dollop of sex considering they’re some way into middle age. Pollux does not, cumulatively, get a lot of page time in the novel, yet I got the sense that he was always there in the background as support. For a time, this secret makes Tookie feel like she’s facing the supernatural alone. For another, although he is a “ceremony man” keeping up Native American rituals (e.g., burning sweetgrass and receiving an eagle corpse from the government to make a fan), he doesn’t believe in ghosts, so Tookie keeps Flora’s haunting of the bookshop from him, as well as from some of her colleagues. For one thing, Pollux, a former tribal policeman, was the one to arrest Tookie. There are some unusual aspects to the central marriage in this novel. The central question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? This time I’m focusing on the relationship between Tookie and Pollux. I wrote a general review of The Sentence in April when it was on the Women’s Prize longlist (it has since advanced to the shortlist). The other members will also be posting their thoughts this week we consider four books per year in total. This has been my first read with the Literary Wives online book club.
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