Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was the tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in the early 1950s, a time when there was a ruthless congressional push to sever the US government’s obligations to the treaties it had made with American Indian nations. Announced on 1 August 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 – the Termination Bill – called for the end of all tribal recognition. ‘In the newspapers, the author of the proposal had constructed a cloud of lofty words around this bill – emancipation, freedom, equality, success – that disguised its truth,’ Erdrich writes. ‘Termination. Missing only the prefix. The ex’.

Louise Erdrich (photograph by Hilary Abe/HarperCollins)

Erdrich’s grandfather wore himself ragged fighting the Termination Bill; campaigning during the day and writing letters during the night, barely sleeping. The Night Watchman takes its inspiration from his vigilant resolve. ‘This book is fiction,’ Erdrich explains. ‘But all the same, I have tried to be faithful to my grandfather’s extraordinary life.’

Thomas Wazhushk is a night watchman at a factory that makes jewel bearings for military ordnances and fancy watches. In the long quiet of the night shift, he attends to the mounting responsibilities of his post as tribal chairman, a job that was supposed to pay thirty dollars a month, but there’s never been enough money to draw a salary. ‘There weren’t enough jobs. There wasn’t enough land … There just wasn’t enough of anything and if he didn’t save what little there was from disappearing there was no imagining how anyone would get along.’

Thomas is part of the ‘after-the-buffalo-who-are-we-now generation’, the first generation born on the reservation. ‘His generation would have to define themselves,’ Erdrich writes. ‘Who was an Indian? ... How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered, and was trying in every way possible to absorb them?’ These are elemental, pressing questions; rumours of the Termination Bill are swirling. ‘We have survived smallpox, the Winchester repeating rifle, the Hotchkiss gun and tuberculosis. We have survived the flu epidemic of 1918, and four or five deadly United States wars,’ Thomas thinks to himself in the echoing dark of the factory. ‘But at last we will be destroyed by a collection of tedious words.’

Thomas has a family to support, a marriage to keep strong, a father slipping away, a community to unite. As sleepless days turn into weeks, he begins to wander into waking dreams, his mind stretched too taut. ‘There was a hollow feeling, a thrumming, a sense that his body had become a drum. That anyone could knock on him and get a sound.’

On the factory floor, Thomas’s niece Patrice ‘Pixie’ Paranteau (a nickname she’s desperate to shed) works as a jewel-setter, her mind as dextrous as her fingers. She too feels attenuated, emptied: ‘like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent’. Her father is a cruel, volatile drunk and her sister, who left Turtle Mountain for the promises of city wealth, has vanished into the Minneapolis underworld. Pixie’s rate of eighty-five cents per hour is ‘the only barrier between her family and disaster’. At least two young men are ‘moony’ over her, but she is wary of their peacocking; she has seen what marriage brings: ‘girls who got married and had children were worn down before the age of twenty. Nothing happened to them but toil.’ Her body still carries the bruises from the last boy she said no to. In Thomas’s story we see what it means to fight; in Pixie’s we see why the fight matters.

Like the quilt on Thomas’s bed – pieced from generations of family coats – The Night Watchman is a patchwork of lovingly stitched vignettes. There are few contemporary writers as generous as Erdrich; few who throw open the doors so wide and so warmly. Each of her novels feels like an invitation. But they are more than invitations, they are the pieces of a grand argument: you can only understand what is at stake, her books tell us, if you take the time to listen. And so we meet Turtle Mountain’s young romantics, aging secret-keepers and wakeful ghosts; its teachers, lechers, and leaders. There is grand humour here: a pair of amorous horses disrupts a parade; two boxers spend the month before their bout conspicuously faking injuries; a pair of hapless Mormon missionaries can’t stand the sight of each other. There is also a quiet hymn to the natural world, its ‘swirling, seething’ energy. ‘How intimately the trees seized the earth,’ Pixie reflects. ‘How exquisitely she was included.’

But circling above it all like some black-winged, bureaucratic vulture is the Termination Bill. Its sponsor, Arthur V. Watkins – a Republican senator from Utah – is a righteous man (in real life, Watkins’s deportment at the Termination Bill hearings was described as ‘convey[ing] an air of rectitude that was almost terrifying’). How can you fight such intractable certainty? How can you even be heard? In our era of political corner-taking, these feel like the questions of the age. Erdrich’s novel suggests they always have been. As the Trump administration flirts with termination-era policies, history is certainly repeating.

The politics inside The Night Watchman is urgent, but this is not an urgent book. Erdrich’s narrative may be driven by Thomas’s and Pixie’s overlapping tales, but it takes the scenic route, a languorous immersion in Turtle Mountain life, from the quotidian pleasures of cracking nuts on the porch to the ferocious rivalries of amateur boxing tournaments, and via dark and desperate detours, from sex trafficking to prison mortality. Sitting in the winter sunshine with his father, Thomas thinks: ‘he should hold onto this. Whatever was said, he should hold on. Whatever gestures his father made, hold on.’ That is precisely what Erdrich does, so carefully and so beautifully: she holds on.