Review: 'The Night Watchman'

The Night Watchman
By Louise Erdrich
Literary Fiction
March 2020
Harper
ISBN: 978-0062671189

Capturing in words someone important to us, memorializing acts, thoughts and feelings, keeping alive that which inspires us about the past and the present -- all of these ideas are essential parts of why people tell stories. Louise Erdrich demonstrates all of these in her new novel, The Night Watchman. It is both a testament to her grandfather, who inspired the night watchman in the story, and a clear call that what her grandfather fought for is something that needs to be fought for today.

Aunishenaubay Patrick Gorneau, Erdrich's grandfather and chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee during the 1950s, is the inspiration for Thomas Wazhushk. He, too, is a tribal chairman and he, too, works as a night watchman at a jewel bearing plant that has created work for many tribal members. It is a factory where jewel bearings are created for watches, and required close eye work and delicate hands.

In between making his rounds, Thomas writes letters and deconstructs the meaning of a congressional bill to terminate his tribe. It will mean everyone will be removed from their homes, the U.S. government will reclaim the land, there will be no tribal services. The tribe will cease to exist, even though the people will be cast adrift.

In between episodes that recount the battle to take on the federal government, the daily lives of several of Thomas's relatives are chronicled. Whether it's Patrice, formerly known as Pixie, searching in the big city for her lost sister, or the white math teacher and boxing coach who clearly adores her, whether it's Thomas's elderly father Bibbon remembering stories from his youth or Wood Mountain training as a boxer and coming into his own as a man, these stories have depth, breadth and a lot of heart.

Even the characters who have made errors or suffered tragedies are good to know and to have a chance to care about. Thomas's childhood friend, Roderick, who has become a ghost, still has discoveries to make. Patrice's co-workers Valentine and Doris make discoveries about themselves while wondering about how well to get to know boys. In an expansion of why a Mormon senator pushed for tribal termination, two young Mormon missionaries have a lot to learn about what they have been taught, including how they were taught to think of Indians and their religion. The senator in the novel, Arthur V. Watkins, is real and his legacy includes both terminating tribes and standing up to Joseph McCarthy.

Any of these stories could have become a full-length novel by themselves. That they are woven together to tell why the termination battle was, and is, so important makes this book even more heartfelt. Or, as Thomas thinks to himself while spending time with his aged father:

It seemed to Thomas, as they sat in the sinking radiancer, shucking bits of shell from the meats, dropping the nuts into a dishpan, that he should hold on this.

Sharing the little that people have with each other, letting go of grudges, marveling at visitations of owls and other creatures, the joy of observing a leaf or creek or sleeping bear in varying seasons -- these are the heart of The Night Watchman. And sharing these stories shows why the fight against the termination of one's tribe is a fight to retain one's deepest sense of self. It is a fight against those who invaded and took the land, who would force Indians to assimilate and forget everything about themselves. It is a fight against breaking agreements, treaties, that were signed to last "as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow".

It is a fight that continues to this day. Just last month, the Trump administration rescinded the tribal status of the Mashpee Wampanoag people. The tribe planned to build a casino on its reservation land that would compete with casinos with ties to Trump, who famously has fought against tribal casinos since the 1990s.

The layers to the title of the novel show how carefully Erdrich built her book. Thomas watches over his people even as he watches over the factory, which helps manufacture watches and gives his people jobs that they don't have to go to the big city to do. They can stay at home, where their ancestors can watch over them, and where they can watch over the land. Or, as Wood Mountain describes it:

"I feel they're with me, those way-back people. I never talk about it. But they're all around us. I could never leave this place."

Thomas is named Wazhushkag, the muskrat. As Erdrich notes:

Although the wazhushkag were numerous and ordinary, they were also crucial. In the beginning, after the great flood, it was a muskrat who had managed to remake the earth. In that way, as it turned out, Thomas was perfectly named.

The Night Watchman also represents how wise it can be to listen to that inner voice. In an afterward, Erdrich confesses that she couldn't get rolling on any new writing projects and feared she would never write again. "Hours later I was jolted awake by some mysterious flow of information: go back to the beginning." And so she read her grandfather's letters and so we all have this beautiful novel that pays tribute to him, to the way he and his people lived every day and to the way they rose to the occasion when life came at them full speed.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'LaRose'

LaRose
By Louise Erdrich
Literary fiction
May 2016
Harper
ISBN: 978-0062277022

Louise Erdrich is a grand chronicler of families. Her novels have featured parts of different families, connected tightly or just in passing, throughout different eras. In her latest novel, LaRose, the families are entwined because of tragedy and because of the deep need to belong.

Landreaux is married to Emmaline. Their youngest child is LaRose, a well-loved boy who has a family name, handed down each generation. Emmaline's half-sister, Nola, is married to Peter. They live nearby and have a son the same age as LaRose, named Dusty.

One day while out hunting, Landreaux accidentally shoots Dusty, who dies.

All four adults are berefit. Landreaux is cleared by the police but not by his own conscience. Wanting to make amends and perhaps hoping to be forgiven, Landreaux and Emmaline follow an old custom. They give LaRose to Nola and Peter to share.

The five-year-old spends part of his time with his birth family, including two teenage girls, an older brother and a boy who they have taken in. That boy, Hollis, is the son of Romeo, an old friend of Landreaux's. They are a loving bunch. The Ojibwe family work hard and take care of each other. 

Over at the other house, there is only Maggie. She is a teenager who is having to grow up very fast. She knows her mother Nola is having a horrific time coping, even more than her kind-hearted, white father, Peter.

Maggie finds it easy to be mean. When some of the loutish boys at her white school attack her, she goes right after them. It's an incident that will have repercussions throughout the novel. 

Repercussions carry the narrative. The way the characters all react to Dusty's death and LaRose's new situation living with both families, the way Romeo resents something that happened between him and Landreaux when they were boys, even the way Emmaline's ancestor, the original LaRose, lived, are not isolated incidents. As Erdrich writes about a character at one point:

The story would be around him for the rest of his life. He would move in the story. He couldn't change it.

That notion fits in well with the idea of belonging. Every character, even Father Travis, who has played a role in other Erdrich novels, tries to find a way to belong. It's not just a matter of fitting in, with the connotation of not being one's own true self. That's what happened to many Native Americans when they were sent to boarding schools to "kill the Indian, and save the man", as the founder of the horrific Carlisle school wrote.

One thing that was not killed in this story is the deeply spiritual side of the characters. From the original LaRose to the siblings of the LaRose in this story, which takes place in the run-up to the beginning of the Iraq War, souls and their journeys have their voices heard. The boarding school trauma and repercussions from various characters having been sent away to them are an important aspect of the story.

Just as in The Round House, when Erdrich weaved in the horrors of what white man laws have done to Native American women, boarding schools are an integral part of who the characters are.

The issues and their impact are serious in Erdrich's work. But she is not a dour novelist. There is much to celebrate in her work, and her characters are the kind to care about because of their joys as well as their sorrows. The spirit of LaRose, a boy wise beyond his years, graces this work even in the pages in which his character does not appear.

©2016 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Review and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Round House'

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews

The Round House
By Louise Erdrich
Literary fiction
October 2012
Harper
ISBN: 978-0062065247

Walking through the kitchen door, I heard a splintering crash. And then a keen, low, anguished cry. My mother was backed up to the sink, trembling, breathing heavily. My father was standing a few feet before her with his hands out, vainly groping in air the shape of her, as if to hold her without holding her. Between them on the floor lay a smashed and oozing casserole.

I looked at my parents and understood exactly what had happened. My father had come in -- surely Mom had heard the car, and hadn't Pearl barked? His footsteps, too, were heavy. He always made noise and was as I have mentioned a somewhat clumsy man. I'd noticed that in the last week he'd also shouted something silly when returning, like, I'm home! But maybe he'd forgotten. Maybe he'd been too quiet this time. Maybe he'd gone into the kitchen, just as he always used to, and then he'd put his arms around my mother as she stood with her back turned. In our old life, she would have kept working at the stove or sink while he peered over her shoulder and talked to her. They'd stand there together in a little tableau of homecoming. Eventually, he'd call me in to help him set the table. He'd change his clothes quickly while she and I put the finishing touches on the meal, and then we would sit down together. We were not churchgoers. This was our ritual. Our breaking bread, our communion. And it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. But now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.

The narrator, Joe, describes in these two paragraphs of Louise Erdrich's National Book Award-winning novel, The Round House, how his family has been torn apart in the aftermath of his mother's rape. Erdrich uses this story of Geraldine Coutt's rape, and how her husband, Bazil, a tribal judge, is helpless as a man and as a tribal judge, to chronicle a family's hurt, a young man's growing up and how ineffectual the law is.

Joe is a teenager in the story, although he tells it from the vantage of an adult looking back. Erdrich thus avoids the young or possibly naive narrator who doesn't know the significance of what he is telling the reader.

The law makes it nearly impossible to prosecute his mother's rapist, even if the attacker is found. She's not certain where the actual rape occurred, if it was on the reservation or not. That means three jurisdictions investigate. Without the Violence Against Women Act, she would have had even less recourse against her attacker.

Joe and his best friends, giddy on Star Trek: The Next Generation and comic books, do a bit of investigating on their own. They do find out some information about the case, but in a way the legal case is the least important part of the story. Geraldine's withdrawal into herself, Bazil's attempts to care for her and Joe's coming-of-age as he discovers things about his parents, his neighbors and himself are more important than legal ramifications.

The Round House is where Geraldine was taken and the place she escaped from. It is a holy place that has now been defiled. The boys go to the Round House and discover possible clues. But they also swim, ride their bikes, tease each other, drink a couple of beers and gorge themselves on the cooking of a granny. Their days are brought to vibrant life, and contrast starkly with the way Joe's mother has gone upstairs to her room and shut herself in.

Erdrich's other characters also spring to life: war-wounded Father Travis; Joe's father the judge, who talked about the weather with a woman who may or may not know something about the attack on his mother; the grannies teasing the teenage boys about manly things. Such life in these things. They not only show the stark contrast at the scope of the tragedy of his mother's rape, they also simply celebrate life that is simply lived.

There are other contrasts in the way other characters treat family and loved ones. Linda was rejected by her mother at birth and adopted by an Indian family. But when her brother Linden needed her later, they sought her out. What she decided at the time and what she does in the novel may be surprising. And then there's Whitey, who owns the local gas station, and his white wife, Sonja, the former exotic dancer. She's motherly and selfish at the same time.

Erdrich has other characters who have appeared in her earlier novels make appearances or are referred to. Father Damien from the wonderful novel, Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, is mentioned in passing. And, of course, there is Mooshum, who her readers have seen at most stages of his life. He figures he's about 112 here. Joe himself is the grandson of the judge in The Plague of Doves.

Mooshum is a bridge between the past and present in this novel. Erdrich uses the device of having him talk in his sleep while Joe listens. Mooshum's stories seem like folk tales, legends, but they have a point in Joe's growing up and the acts he takes over the course of the summer following his mother's rape. Mooshum tells about Nanapush, who saw how to make the Round House by listening to an old female buffalo which he has killed and has burrowed into her carcass to survive a storm.

That Joe's mother, and another woman, were taken to the Round House after being raped, and that the site where their attacker tried to kill them, is this place to be respected, adds to their defilement. It is not just that they were attacked. It is not just that they were nearly murdered. The entire tribe's place of honor has been sullied.

The fact that the laws that have come to govern the tribe cannot protect the women is not glossed over. It is a shameful fact. News reports during the last Congress, when the Violence Against Women Act was held up, noted that 34 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women are raped.

There comes a point in the long summer of his mother shutting herself away that his father brings out all the silverware in the kitchen and aligns them on the table in a pattern only he can see, built around a moldy casserole that neighbors brought after the attack and which had been forgotten in the back of the refrigerator. The judge is building bridges between Johnston v. McIntosh, the 1823 Supreme Court case that codified the European/white land grab, and the day when tribes are allowed
 "the right to prosecute criminals of all races on all lands within our original boundaries". Every small case the judge decides builds toward the day.

The novel concerns itself with both this right to be a sovereign people with all rights that come with existence, especially rights within one's property, and with the ways in which women are disrespected both by law (with the treatment of rape victims and the limits of prosecution against rapists in both white and Indian jurisdiction) and by men (the way Joe considers former stripper Sonja who helps him after he makes an important find). There is much balance in the novel, such as the wealth of healthy sex jokes amongst the grown-ups as counterpoint to both the trauma of Joe's mother's rape and the innocence of the boys.

Mostly, the novel is about love. The love that Joe's parents, Bazil and Geraldine, have for each other and for their son, and he for them. The love that Whitey and Sonja have. The love that Joe's friend Cappy experiences for the first time with the beautiful Zelia, who comes to the reservation from Helena on a mission to convert them all back to Catholicism. The love boys have for each other when they are as close as brothers and stand with each other whenever one is hurting. The love that knows when it is broken.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission