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BYEMILYBOBROW

L

OUISE ERDRICH’Sgrandfather,
Patrick Gourneau, was the tribal
chairman of the Turtle Mountain
Band of Chippewa in North
Dakota in the 1950s, a golden age
for the country but a dark time for Native
Americans. Amid the postwar housing boom,
promised tribal land was under threat. A
federal bill called for terminating recognition
of all tribes, and for the immediate relocation
of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa. Gourneau
had a full-time job as a night watchman at a
local factory but still sent countless letters to
political representatives, held innumerable
meetings, deployed lots of strategic flattery
and led a Chippewa delegation to Washington.
Although the government ended up
terminating 113 tribal nations and reclaiming
1.4 million acres of tribal land, the Turtle
Mountain Chippewa were mostly left alone.
According to Ms. Erdrich, Gourneau had
effectively “challenged the juggernaut” of the
federal push to sever its pacts with Native
Americans. She was so inspired by this David-
and-Goliath story that she has made it the
plot of her 17th novel, “The Night Watchman.”
This book is fiction, but in a brief intro-
duction Ms. Erdrich writes that she has
“tried to be faithful” to her grandfather’s
“extraordinary life.” In his place, she has
created Thomas Wazhashk, a humane and
hard-working family man, aptly named for
the muskrat (“wazhashk”), the lowly yet
industrious rodent that “helped remake the
earth” after the great flood. Thomas’s
father’s family had hunted buffalo across the
plains until the government confined them to
a patch of land and pushed them to farm,
without guidance or tools. As a member of
“the after-the-buffalo-who-are-we-now
generation,” Thomas was among the first to
be born on a reservation, speak English
(with an accent) andget stuck with the
existential question: “Who was an Indian?
What?... And how?”
When Thomas’s father sent him to a
government-run boarding school, he told him
to study hard “because we need to know the
enemy.” Thomas learned not only to write
letters in perfect Palmer Method script, but
also the importance of being “elaborately
polite” to white people. He had assumed
that if he worked hard and followed the rules,
he could keep his family safe and his tribe
secure, but the government had other plans.
In the autumn of 1953, he learns that
Congress would soon be deliberating a bill to
“emancipate” the tribes—that is, push them
off their land. “So it comes down to this,” he
thought while staring at the bill’s euphemis-
tically neutral language. “We have survived
smallpox, the Winchester repeating rifle, the
Hotchkiss gun, and tuberculosis. We have
survived the flu epidemic of 1918, and fought
in four or five deadly United States wars.
But at last we will be destroyed by a collec-
tion of tedious words.For the disposition of,
for the intensification of, for the termination of,
to provide for.. .”

A page-

turner

featuring

hostile

aliens,

brave

teens

and a

scary

plant

that’s

half

pothole,

half

Venus

flytrap.

CHILDREN’S

BOOKS

MEGHAN

COXGURDON

This book is mainly about Thomas’s

crusade to save his people, but it is also—

like many of Ms. Erdrich’s novels—about life

on the reservation, in all of its struggle and

magic. The array of characters includes Wood

Mountain, a simple-minded young boxer who

experiences his feelings like the weather,

suffering or enjoying them without much

thought. There is also his coach, the white

math teacher Lloyd Barnes, who took a job

on the reservation with the hope of meeting

the kind of “lovely Indian maiden in flowing

buckskin” he grew up seeing on milk cartons

but falls hard for a much more complicated

woman. Elder Elnath and Elder Vernon, two

hapless young missionaries, are trying to get

Indians to pray with them with promises that

Mormonism will lighten their “swarthy hides.”

Then there’s Millie Cloud, an idiosyncratic

academic with a forceful manner, a charging

walk, and a fondness for geometric patterns,

who wears bright carmine-red lipstick to

emphasize everything she says. “People didn’t

like her. Men were put off. She didn’t care, much.”

The Turtle Mountain Chippewa are mostly

dirt-poor subsistence farmers who are trying

to hold on to their language and traditions in

the face of pressures to conform. These

fissures are often generational. Besides

Thomas, Ms. Erdrich rests this book on the

narrow shoulders of a young woman every-

one calls Pixie, even though “Patrice” is the

name by which she hopes to “rise in the

world.” Pixie’s mother, Zhaanat, speaks only

Chippewa, knows the medicinal powers of

every herb, sees spirits everywhere and

believes things started going wrong when

places were hubristically named for people

instead of “the real things that happened”

there—“the dreaming, the eating, the death,

the appearance of animals.” Pixie, however,

speaks Chippewa, but also English. She

follows her mother’s teachings, but also

became a Catholic and her class valedictorian.

When she wants to impress people, she wears

her hair in pin-curl waves.

Pixie is eager to avoid the snares of

domesticity, having seen how marriage and

children have worn out her former classmates

before they even turned 20. This means she

is often trying to put off her many moony

suitors (“Hell on wheels sharp. That’s what

she is,” observes one of them, worshipfully).

Instead, she supports her family with a

“white-people job” at the first factory to open

near the reservation, the same jewel-bearings

plant where Thomas works as a night watch-

man. She hopes to one day go back to school,

The Night Watchman

By Louise Erdrich

Harper, 451 pages, $28.99

but first she needs to find her sister, Vera,

who has mysteriously disappeared.

Although Ms. Erdrich has long felt a duty

to chronicle the Native American experience,

she mostly avoids burdening her books with

an obvious political agenda. Her tangled and

unpredictable multigenerational sagas, with

their recurring characters and territories, are

largely about the messiness of survival. “The

Night Watchman,” however, feels uncharacter-

istically and ploddingly schematic. The heroes

and villains are so cleanly drawn that one can

easily imagine the Frank Capra adaptation.

Ms. Erdrich’s noble desire to do justice to

her grandfather’s memory seems to have

compromised her talent for psychological

complexity. Thomas is so good as to be

almost boring. He simply adores his wife of

33 years (“It was only Rose and always Rose”);

bonds easily with his obedient son, who is

smart, “like all of his children”; and just loves

shucking nuts and talking with his wise, artic-

ulate 94-year-old father (“Whatever was said,

he should hold on to”). Despite sleep depri-

vation, owing to his tenacious advocacy and

nocturnal job, Thomas always seems to do

the proper thing, even when it is impractical.

Pixie feels similarly archetypal as the

pretty yet plucky heroine with little need

for—but a great deal of desire from—men.

There is something a little annoying about all

of her strength and courage, her good sense,

cute figure and ability to do nearly everything

well. (Readers may start to confuse this

Chippewa reservation with Lake Wobegon,

where “all the women are strong, all the men

are good-looking, and all the children are

above average.”) The most thrilling part of

the book is when Pixie travels to Minneapolis

in search of her sister, yet here too she is un-

failingly gutsy with even the seediest of men.

When she ends up becoming the main attrac-

tion in a sordid, Paul Bunyan-themed bar,

dancing underwater in a Babe the Blue Ox

rubber suit, she slips with remarkable ease

into the prescribed choreography: “Swivel

hips. Over-the-shoulder peek. Tush wag.

Bubbles. Kisses. Surface. Breathe.” Yet she

leaves Minneapolis after only a few nights,

ensuring her strong moral character remains

uncorrupted.

Ms. Erdrich explains in an afterword that

she hopes this book shows that we are not

powerless in the face of bad government

policies. She wants Thomas to embody the idea

that, with enough hard work, anyone is capable

of effecting meaningful change. This is cer-

tainly a worthy goal—and a timely one, too.

But Ms. Erdrich has unfortunately curbed her

considerable gifts as a writer in order to make

this novel a vehicle for an inspirational message.

Ms. Bobrow, a former editor for the Economist,

is a journalist based in New York.

After the Buffalo,Who AreWe Now?

HANS WILD/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Thomas is one of the first

Chippewa to be born on a

reservation. His father

sends him to school ‘because

we need to know the enemy.’

BOOKS

‘We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.’—LOUISE ERDRICH, ‘LOVE MEDICINE’

KENNETH OPPELhas written

a thriller so exciting that the

pages might well have been

printed with adrenaline.

Not only is“Bloom” (Knopf,

312 pages, $16.99)a heart-

pounder; it’s also the first

installment in a planned

trilogy. So even as readers

ages 10 and older are galloping

through the chapters, they’ll

have the delicious satisfaction

of knowing that the story

doesn’t end with the final page.

And what a story! Mr. Oppel

combines conceits that we’ve

seen before—invasive plants,

hostile aliens, teenagers with

unsuspected strengths—and

twined them into a grisly,

wonderful hybrid.

High-schoolers Petra and

Anaya used to be best friends;

now they dislike each other

almost as much as they do

the severe allergies that plague

them both. Seth is new at

school; he’s a foster kid with

scars down his arms. Everyone

is getting on with adolescence,

happily or otherwise, when the

skies open and rain begins to

pour down on the island off

Vancouver where they all live.

In no time, stalks of strange

black grass are jutting from the

earth, razor-sharp and so fast-

growing that overnight they

form dark walls and canyons,

“rustling in the wind, scraping

against one another like eerie

radio static.” Amid clouds of

choking pollen, more black veg-

etation bursts forth: strangling

vines, acidic flowers and a

nightmarish plant that’s half

pothole and half Venus flytrap.

As the adult world struggles

to make sense of what’s

happening—the plants are

everywhere, destroying crops,

animals and people—Petra,

Anaya and Seth realize that

they’re outliers of some kind.

The girls’ allergies have van-

ished, and all three teens feel

better in their bodies than they

ever have before. It’s all so

propulsive that some readers

may find themselves using one

hand to cover the paragraphs

they haven’t read yet, to keep

their devouring eyes from

jumping ahead. The second

installment comes out in Sep-

tember, not a minute too soon.

So much for adrenaline,

now for caffeine, which is

what Shawn Harris seems to

have used in his dazzling

illustrations for“Everyone’s

Awake” (Chronicle, 48 pages,

$17.99), a picture book by

Colin Meloy. As the moon rises

in a deep blue sky, everyone

in the unnamed narrator’s

lakeside house seems to have

gone mad: “The dog’s into the

eggnog; / Mom’s tap dancing

to Prince / while Dad is on the

laptop / buying ten-yard bolts

of chintz.” As the night

progresses, the looniness

intensifies, with each new

picture more chaotic and

eye-popping than the

one before. In one

tableau, the

mother stands on

the roof bathed in

blue moonlight, “fix-

ing broken slates,” while

in the electric-yellow-and-

orange light of indoors the

father trims topiaries with a

chainsaw and the brother

juggles dinner plates. In every

picture, there’s at least one

frog to seek and find, a rare

touch of calm amid the insom-

niac rowdiness of this rhyming

tale for children ages 5-8.

Many children are familiar

with Aesop’s fables, but it is a

fair bet that few know much

about the storyteller himself.

In a picture-book biography,

“The Fabled Life of Aesop”

(HMH, 64 pages, $18.99),Ian

Lendler frames 10 of the man’s

best-known morality tales

inside a necessarily speculative

account of his origins and fate.

The narrative structure allows

the book to work for younger

children ages 3-5, to whom an

adult might read just the fables,

and for older ones, ages 6-8,

who with their keener sense of

social dynamics will benefit

from seeing the stories set in

the context of Aesop’s life. Born

a slave “sometime around 2,500

years ago and somewhere near

Greece,” we read, the clever

Aesop learned early to use

animal stories to “tell the truth

without angering his master.”

Thus were born such lasting

stories as “The Fox and the

Grapes,” “The Tortoise and

the Hare,” and “The Ant and

the Grasshopper.” Pamela

Zagarenski’s luminous, slightly

distempered artwork (see above)

brings richness and delicacy

to this beautiful volume.

On the morning of April 26,

1986, the residents of Pripyat,

in Soviet Ukraine, woke to a

world made strange. Overnight

a reactor at the nearby

Chernobyl nuclear power plant

had exploded, and now eerie

blue smoke boiled into a

scarlet sky. This is the scene

that greets fictional fifth-

graders and sworn enemies

Valentina Kaplan and Oksana

Savchenko at the start of

“The Blackbird Girls” (Viking,

340 pages, $17.99), a nuanced

novel for readers ages 9-14 by

Anne Blankman. Both girls’

fathers work at the plant;

neither has come home from

his shift. Both mothers send

their girls to school. “If we

don’t carry on as usual,” Valen-

tina’s mother warns,

“we look as though we

don’t trust the people

at the power station.

And we mustn’t”—

her daughter finishes

the sentence: “Risk attention.”

As Jews, the Kaplans have

to be extra careful not to draw

the eye of the secret police,

but as readers will come to

understand from Ms. Blank-

man’s deft historical sketching,

anyone could run afoul of

the Communist authorities.

Told from the alternating

perspectives of Valentina

and Oksana in 1986—and,

in flashbacks, of a young girl in

Ukraine during World War II—

the story explores what it

means to be true tooneself

and one’s dearest friends in a

capricious and watchful society

where lies are safer than truth.

“The Blackbird Girls” is not

always an easy read—Ms.

Blankman deals forthrightly

with anti-Semitism and domestic

violence—but it is a lovely one.

Green Shoots and Dark Shadows

THIS WEEK

Bloom

ByKennethOppel

Everyone’s Awake

ByColinMeloy

IllustratedbyShawnHarris

The Fabled Life of Aesop

ByIanLendler

IllustratedbyPamelaZagarenski

The Blackbird Girls

ByAnneBlankman

HMH