Setting: Turtle Mountain Reservation, North Dakota, 1953
First lines: Thomas Wazhashk removed his thermos from his armpit and set it on the steel desk alongside his scuffed briefcase. His work jacket went on the chair, his lunch box on the cold windowsill.
Louise Erdrich, one of my favourite writers, brings the 1950s community of the Turtle Mountain Reservation to life in this highly absorbing, polyphonic novel.
The Night Watchman‘s two main strands each have a criminal dimension. Patrice ‘Pixie’ Paranteau is a young woman whose work at the reservation’s factory allows her to provide for her mother and siblings. But her sister Vera recently vanished after moving to Minnesota, and Pixie now urgently needs to find her and her baby. At the same time, factory night watchman and Chippewa Council member Thomas Wazhashk is becoming seriously concerned about Resolution 108, which is due to go before Congress before too long. Styled as an ’emancipation’ bill, 108 threatens to abolish the official status of tribes as a means of appropriating yet more Native American land and rights — a wave of state-sanctioned violence that Thomas must somehow try to counter.
The Night Watchman is at times very hard-hitting, but portrays the Turtle Mountain community with humour and warmth. While never sentimental, it shows the power of determination and grass-roots organisation (the character of Thomas is based on the author’s own grandfather), and the resilience and resourcefulness of women like Pixie.
The novel won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman, Corsair 2021, 464 pp.
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