The Night Watchman

Thomas Wazhashk works nights as a watchman at the jewel bearing plant near the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota, and spends the quiet hours writing letters. It is 1953, and a bill is moving through Congress that would terminate federal recognition of several tribes, dissolving treaty obligations under language about emancipation and freedom. Thomas, a council member, sets out to understand it and then to stop it.

Alongside him is Patrice Paranteau, nineteen, the fastest worker on the plant floor, supporting her mother and her drunk father, who travels to Minneapolis to look for a sister who went there and stopped writing. What she finds is the other end of the same policy.

Erdrich moves between a dozen viewpoints, including a boxer in love with Patrice, a Mormon missionary teaching the men to fight, a mathematics teacher and a ghost, and the tonal range is wide: bureaucratic detail, comedy, romance and a genuinely frightening sequence where Patrice performs in a nightclub water tank act.

Much of the book is simply work and cold. People walk miles in a North Dakota winter, hunt, haul water, and set the bearings that go into aircraft, and the plant jobs matter because they are the only cash on the reservation.

It is warm and busy and much more readable than a novel about legislation has any right to be. Best for readers new to Erdrich, since it stands entirely alone. Be aware the cast is large and the first fifty pages ask you to hold a lot of names.