The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Douglas Abrams &The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

I admitted to some well read friends recently that I have never read Louise Erdrich before. What? Well. Now I have. The Sentence is a hoot. It’s also a love story — about a man and a woman, about families, about indy bookstores and their loyal customers, about community. It’s also a tribute to all the people who’ve ever worked for a better world, especially the American Indian Movement and the George Floyd protestors, but also just folks who make their loved ones special food when they’re down, or who recommends something good to read, or hold up an ipad so loved ones can visit with the hospitalized. I loved it.

The main character, Tookie, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for a very strange crime involving a dead body and unrequited love. Her lawyer recognizes she had no idea of the fact that there were drugs planted on the body, and even though the judge (in Erdrich’s brief but searing critique of our justice system) is merciless, the lawyer works tirelessly to get her sentence commuted. When she gets out, she marries the guy who arrested her, her childhood friend, Pollux. In November 2019, Tookie is working in Birchbark Books (Louise Erdrich’s real bookstore; she even writes herself into the story), when one of their regular customers, Flora, dies and starts haunting the bookstore, especially when Tookie is there. The rest of the book follows the events from that fall to the next – including the beginning of the pandemic, George Floyd’s death, and the Black Lives Matter protests – and how Tookie manages it all — the haunting, lockdown, essential worker status, Pollux’s daughter moving in with them with her new baby.

In the book as in real life, Birchbark’s “staff is of either Native background, or exceedingly Native-friendly” (from the store’s website). They’re also a real community, and several of them help Tookie figure out what’s going with Flora. The sentence of the title is a clue — she died reading a rare journal entitled The Sentence: An Indian Captivity 1862-1888. Tookie comes to believe the very sentence she was reading as she died has something to do with her death. Then there is Tookie’s sentence, which changed the trajectory of her life and of a few others’. Reading it now, a couple of years after George Floyd’s death — a man who like other BIPOC people in America was sentenced to living in a racist country — and also the decisions early in the pandemic which sentenced millions of Americans to die unnecessarily of COVID; I can see this novel is also about those sentences.

Tookie is not an optimistic or sunny person; she is a survivor of many traumas. She says about herself fairly early in the book:

“I am an ugly woman. Not the kind of ugly that guys write or make movies about, where suddenly I have a blast of instructional beauty. I am not about teachable moments. Nor am I beautiful on the inside. I enjoy lying, for instance, and am good at selling people useless things for prices they cannot afford. Of course, now that I am rehabilitated, I only sell words. Collections of words between cardboard covers. Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.”

What matters? In Tookie’s world, it’s love, it’s family and community, it’s certain customers, it’s the way her grandson jarvis at three weeks old, “saw that what was left of my heart was good and loving.” It may be many other things. Truth, and freedom, and ancestry, and respect and honor. This book, and many others, does contain those things, though. So I am not sure what Tookie means. Unless it is that everyone comes to their own conclusions about what matters. But she herself says that books have helped her with that, so it’s a mysterious statement.

The Sentence is a terrific book, a quick but deep, thoughtful, and actually very funny read. And, as a bonus, it contains a whole lot of recommendations from indie booksellers about what else to read.

I also finished reading The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Douglas Abrams, for a book discussion at church. It’s the story of a visit Tutu made in 2015 to Dharamsala for the Dalai Lama’s 80th birthday. He had invited the Dalai Lama to South Africa for his own 80th, but the government there, to please China, denied the Dalai Lama a visa.

Abrams and the two holy men’s teams arranged to film the visit and to produce this book as well as a film. It was not just a social call, even though the two men love each other and delight in each other’s friendship. They were working towards producing a legacy, something the world could use long after they have each passed away to apply their teachings about joy — what it is, what gets in its way, how we can nurture it, and why practices meant to increase our own joy can also leave the world better than we found it.

One of the remarkable things is that exile from one’s country and political repression are not obstacles to joy. Neither is such suffering redemptive, in their minds — it is instructive, it teaches us to find compassion for ourselves and others experiencing similar suffering. These two wise elders make note that joy is a reservoir to draw on, that we can tap by connecting with the “pillars” of joy: shifting our perspective, thinking less of ourselves and focusing on others, having a sense of humor, accepting reality in this moment (again not to give up on change, but to recognize the present is what it is), forgiving, being grateful, being generous, and nurturing the compassion that we are all born feeling for others.

None of this is rocket science and if you’ve studied mindfulness it may not be new, but the joy of these two men, as they joke and share and answer questions, makes this book unique. You don’t have to be religious to find it interesting; the Dalai Lama in fact says that after 3000 years of trying to teach people to be compassionate through religion maybe it’s time to try something else (he proposes education). And their teachings are especially poignant now, as we are experiencing a spring COVID surge and both the number of deaths from COVID and from guns in our country — all entirely preventable — is overwhelming.

This book isn’t about turning away from sorrow and suffering, or tuning them out to focus on joy. Abrams explains as they are getting ready to leave, “. . . the more we turn away from our self-regard to wipe the tears from the eyes of another, the more — incredibly — we are able to bear, to heal, and to transcend our own suffering. This was their true secret to joy.”

A hopeful read, and there are detailed guides to practicing each of the pillars I mentioned. In the past twenty four hours I found the teaching about tonglen — giving compassion and taking suffering — useful although I need a lot of practice.

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He had me at Girlbrarian — Matthew Quick’s The Good Luck of Right Now

Last weekend I finished an advance copy of Matthew Quick‘s The Good Luck of Right Now, out next week. If the name sounds familiar, he’s the author of several other books, including The Silver Linings Playbook. If that book is about “love, madness, and Kenny G.” as Quick’s website says, the new one is about love, difference, and Richard Gere. As I read the new book I could picture it — Quick has a very cinematic way of setting a scene — and I’m happy to hear that the directors of Little Miss Sunshine are already lined up for the film version.

Quick has a knack for getting inside the lives of people we see all the time and don’t bother to know. In this case, a thirty-eight year old man, Bartholomew, who’s always lived with his mom, who recently died of cancer. And his messed up grief counselor, Wendy, who needs help herself. And his neighborhood priest, Father McNamee, who defrocks himself and moves in with Bartholomew.

And a guy Bartholomew meets in “group” therapy, Max. Who turns out to be the brother of the woman Bartholomew has admired from afar, who he knows only as The Girlbrarian. Her real name is Elizabeth. Max is mourning his cat Alice, believes Elizabeth was abducted by aliens who are still after them, and dreams of going to Cat Parliament in Ottawa (which we’ve visited — “call it synchronicity,” as Bartholomew might say). Max is a ticket taker at a movie theater and works “what the fuck, hey” into nearly every sentence.

Bartholomew narrates the book in letters he’s writing to Richard Gere. After his mother’s death, he found a form letter in her dresser from the actor, calling for a boycott of the 2008 Olympics because of China’s treatment of Tibet. Bartholomew assumes that is why she kept calling him Richard as her cancer worsened. He played along, so he sets out to explain things to Richard Gere, and himself, as he faces the scary prospect of living alone when he’s not even sure how his bills are paid.

Bartholomew spends a lot of time at his library, where he reads about Richard Gere and Tibet. He also reads the Dalai Lama’s A Profound Mind. His letters to Richard Gere make it clear that Bartholomew is developmentally disabled. The “little angry man” inside him calls him moron, retard, idiot, “miserable failure,” slow, stupid; he’s never held a job, he’s never really had a friend or gone out with a woman.

But he’s very observant, empathetic, and capable of learning — he writes to Richard Gere about Buddhism, Jung, Tibet-China relations. He explains how he senses suffering in others, what he admires about the Girlbrarian, how he’s dealing with the loss of his mother. And he explains her theory of “the good luck of right now,” that brings good for every bad. And how she was good at “pretending” — for him, but perhaps for herself as well.

If you are looking for a quick read (no pun intended), a movie-like story with teary moments but a feel-good vibe, this book is for you. It’s not as lightweight as that sounds — Quick addresses some big questions, like how society treats people who are different, and what family is. It’s not a hard read, until you look around, say at the library, and see people like Bartholomew. And wonder if they’ve been working up the courage, but not quite managing, to speak to someone they see day after day.

And then it’s a hard book in the best sense, because it worms its way into your heart. And makes you see the Bartholomews, Maxes, Elizabeths, Wendys, and Father McNamees in your own life.

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