No one writes about winter quite like Louise Erdrich. She describes a kind of cold that is suspended in both space and time: the bitter frozen air of the upper latitudes of the American Midwest is narrated and re-narrated across a hundred years of winter memories. In her novels cold is not so much experienced as it is embodied—her characters don’t survive it, they become it. For example, this description, from her early novel, Tracks:
Then the slivers of ice began to collect and cover us. We became so heavy, weighted down with the lead, gray frost, that we could not move. Our hands lay on the table like cloudy blocks. The blood with us grew thick. We needed no food. And little warmth. Days passed, weeks and we didn’t leave the cabin for fear we’d crack our cold fragile bodies.
In her more recent novel, The Night Watchman, there is a scene in which the titular character, Thomas Wazhashk, accidentally locks himself out of the factory in the middle of a subzero winter night. The door has slammed shut—his jacket, flashlight, keys—all are inside. He’s good at his job: every lock on the building is in working order, every handle screwed in tight, every window secure. There’s no way to get back inside. Soon, he’s so cold that his brain is slowing down, “even his armpits are numb.”
The scene is a metaphor for the difficulty of the stories at the center of the novel: Thomas is trying to organize his local council to defeat a national Native dispossession bill that is about to be passed in Congress. Patrice “Pixie” Paranteau is trying to find her sister Vera, who has disappeared into a dark, drugged-up 1950s Minneapolis. The resilience and intelligence that Pixie and Thomas bring to their causes is formidable, but the situations are desperate.
But it’s an Erdrich novel, so there are greater forces at work. Hovering amongst its characters are beings and energies, capable of embodying the power of northern lights into the body of a lone night watchman, capable of leading a young woman from a fate worse than death back to the safety of her family. As with all Erdrich’s books, there is humor—the usual cast of pranksters and tricksters, and, for this particular book, there’s a self-owning Senator, too.
Best of all, the story is based on the letters of Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who fought against Native termination, and includes snippets from the Congressional Record from the time. It has all of the things that so many of us already love about Louise Erdrich’s worlds, plus the thrill of knowing that this marvelous story of a particularly intrepid night watchman is, in many ways, true.
Courtney Cook is a writer who works in a technology company. She lives in Wilder, VT and publishes the weekly newsletter, "Survival by Book," at courtneycook.substack.com.