The Night Watchman

As a testament to how much I loved this, I was really struggling with my “books can only come and go, not stay, in the 31' travel trailer in which I currently live” policy, wanting to hang on to this foreverrrrrrr. Then a good friend I saw this past weekend said they'd been wanting to read Erdich but couldn't decide where to start, and that felt like the kind of interconnectedness that Erdich herself would appreciate, so off it went. This novel is just gorgeous. It seems to me that writers who create both poetry and prose well have especially gobsmacking prose, and that is certainly true of Erdich. It documents her ancestors' experience of the federal attempt to “terminate” (what an evil word/concept) the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in the 1950s in ways that always feel evocative, not didactic, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a novel with this many characters whose humanity is all drawn in full-fledged detail, not to mention a few ghosts and assorted animals. So I suppose humanity isn't the right word, but aliveness. Will definitely be reading more of her work.