She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.
--The Night Watchman, Louis Erdrich
Some years ago, back in the dark ages of my life, the 1980s, I carried on a brief correspondence with Louis Erdrich, author of a novel, Love Medicine, that I had by happenstance picked up and read and fallen immediately to the thrall of her words. Her sentences, her rhythm, her diction seemed to possess a unique magic, part music, part poetry, all sharp-edged blade. I heaped upon that author effusive praise, which she, being a young writer herself at that time, thoroughly appreciated. "My husband and I have read your letter to each other quite a number of times," she admitted. In a subsequent letter, she mentioned that they would be appearing at Powell's Books in Portland and that I should come say hello, but I was very shy at that time, and usually drunk, and ultimately declined. Instead, I simply continued to read her novels as they appeared--Tracks, the Beet Queen, The Bingo Palace, and so on.
It is a pleasure to read her latest, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 2021, The Night Watchman. As with all of Erdrich's novels, we are invited back into the world of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Indian tribe, their age-old struggles, their wit, their self-deprecating sense of humor, their stoicism, their heroism, their existence in tension between tale and reality, this world and another, older world. And I find that Ms. Erdrich is as sharp and as genuine ever, having lost not a single step over time.
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