The Night Watchman is a 2020 novel by Louise Erdrich.
It is set in the mid-1950s on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, a real place
in North Dakota near the Canadian border, and home to a band of the Ojibwe (Chippewa) tribe. Life on the reservation is a struggle, with mass unemployment, poverty, disease. The novel follows two separate but related narrative tracks.
- Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman of the title, who works at the local jewel bearing factory but also is a community leader and councilman. He is disturbed to learn of an "Indian Termination Bill" (a real thing), which would empower the federal government to strip recognition from Indian tribes, with the goal of withdrawing their meager benefits and forcing them to assimilate into mainstream American society. Thomas sees this bill as the mortal threat that it is and decides to lead opposition.
- Patrice Paranteau, a 19-year-old woman who works on the assembly line at the jewel bearing factory. She is the sole source of support for herself, her mother, and her little brother, her father being an abusive drunk. Patrice, who is both pretty and strong-willed has two different men after her: Wood Mountain, an Ojibwe and a boxer, and Lloyd Barnes, a white man and Wood's boxing coach. Patrice is worried about her sister Vera, who has not been heard from in some time, and goes to Minneapolis to find her.
Tropes:
- The Alcoholic: Patrice's father is a drunk, and a particularly hard case. On the few occasions he's seen at home he's usually ransacking the place, looking for money to spend on liquor. Patrice has to bury her money so her father doesn't find it.
- Barefoot Poverty: Not quite—but Patrice has just the one pair of shoes, and that's it. So when she has to walk through a marshy area on the way home, she takes her shoes off.
- Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Lampshaded when Thomas and Wood Mountain, who were already making a cradleboard for Patrice's baby nephew, find themselves also having to make a coffin for Patrice's father."I suppose we shouldn't tell Zhanaat we were making the grave house and cradle board at the same time," he said to Wood Mountain.
- Buxom Beauty Standard: Doris, the white girl who works at the factory with Patrice and Valentine, pronounces herself "dumpy, sweaty, awkward" and says she isn't attractive to boys. This catches Patrice by surprise, as she observes Doris's "large bosom and short, curvy legs" and concludes that she's pretty.
- Country Mouse: Wood Mountain expresses concern about Patrice going to Minneapolis, pointing out that she's never been to a city in her life. Sure enough, literally as soon as she leaves the train station, Patrice gets into the car of a taxi driver who turns out to not be a taxi driver. He kidnaps her, taking her to a sleazy nightclub and trying to force her to dress up in a costume and perform onstage. She's eventually coaxed into performing by Jack, the marginally less sleazy manager of the club.
- Dead Person Conversation: Part of the Magical Realism motif has Thomas holding conversations with spirits, and it's ambiguous as to whether or not it's meant to be "real". He sees the ghost of Roderick, and he routinely talks with his old friend Archille, long dead of tuberculosis.Thomas had friends on the other side....Sometimes, he talked to them.
- Domestic Abuse: Bernadette is living with an abusive man named Cal. Patrice sees bruises under her makeup.
- Extra Digits: Patrice's mother Zhaanat has some pretty wacky hands, missing a pinky on one but having a second "perfect thumb" on the other. Lloyd, who is already ill at ease because Patrice wasn't there when he stopped by and because he senses he is unwelcome, is made even more uneasy by this.
- Functional Addict: Jack, who runs the sleazy club where Patrice briefly works. He is said to be a junkie but Bernadette describes it as "a controlled habit."
- Hates Being Nicknamed: Patrice is called "Pixie" and it pisses her off. She insists on being called by her actual name.
- Job Title: Thomas is a night watchman at the factory. He is also in a more symbolic sense a watchman over his people, trying to protect them from this latest threat.
- Kimono Fanservice: Patrice tracks down her old schoolmate Bernadette in Minneapolis and is startled to discover that the awkward child she knew is now "a stunner" who is "wearing a silk kimono with pink blossoms."
- Love Triangle: Both Lloyd Barnes and Wood Mountain have an interest in Patrice. There's a double meaning here as Lloyd and Wood basically represent two different futures for Patrice.
- Magic Realism: Various instances of this scattered throughout the book.
- A ghost named Roderick is regarded casually by the characters who can see him, almost as if he were still alive.
- In the backstory, a classmate tried to rape Patrice. Soon after he was stricken by a partial facial paralysis, which is said to have been caused by magic.
- Patrice tracks down the last known address of her sister Vera, but finds only a filthy abandoned apartment with a dog on a chain. The dog speaks to her, telling her that Vera was chained up when she died.
- Neglected Rez: Turtle Mountain, where what Indians remain struggle to make a life for themselves and maintain their culture. Thomas understands that, among other things, termination of tribal recognition will make it that much easier for whites to come in and buy what little is left of the reservation.
- One-Paragraph Chapter:
- Several chapters are brief, but the briefest is titled "Agony Would Be Her Name." It comes right after Patrice has told Thomas that she has reason to believe that her sister Vera was held in chains and is currently still being held captive by some very bad people. The chapter in question is only a single paragraph that starts out saying "The men smelled of hot oil, liquor sweat, spoiled meat, a million cigarettes..." and further says that "If she wanted to get away, she'd have to run through knives." It ends with the unnamed "she" hearing her mother calling to her. It's very heavily implied that the unnamed woman being held in such terror is Vera.
- An only slightly longer one-paragraph chapter again is focused on Vera. She was being kept as a sex slave in the hold of a ship, and she was apparently suffering from heroin withdrawal; at the end of the paragraph the sailors dump her in an alley.
- Roman à Clef: Thomas is a fictionalized version of Louise Erdrich's real-life grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who was tribal chairman at Turtle Rock and fought the termination bill just as the character of Thomas does in the book.
- Scatterbrained Senior: Thomas's mother-in-law Noko is suffering from dementia, and no longer recognizes him.
- Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: Patrice's mother Zhanaat greets Lloyd by telling him quite bluntly that Patrice doesn't like him because he smells bad. (She tells her son Pokey that, actually, Patrice just doesn't like him, but Zhanaat thinks all white people smell bad.)
- Traumatic Haircut: Back when he was young, Thomas had to go to a white-run boarding school because his family didn't have enough food. His mother cut his hair before he left, because they both knew that the whites would force him to get a haircut when he came to the school.
- Victoria's Secret Compartment: Where Patrice puts the money she made performing at the sleazy nightclub, because she is basically escaping and she is afraid she might be robbed.
- Xenofiction: A chapter about the homecoming parade at the high school has two of the horses in the parade breaking away and running off to mate. The next chapter, only two pages long, is from the POV of the horses as they're coming back after sex. (They regard humans as "tiresome beings.")
