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Sterling Watson's NIGHT LETTER is a psychological thriller, a coming-of-age story and a sprawling historical epic. It is a massively ambitious novel, not without flaws but engrossing to the end.
Set in Nevada and (mostly) central Florida during the Vietnam War era, NIGHT LETTER follows the picaresque adventures of Travis Hollister, a Japanese-American teenager who has spent his entire adolescence in a Nevada reform school and at the start of the novel emerges from it to try to make his way in a profoundly confusing world. Salinger seems like a definite influence. Hollister finds out from his reform-school pleasure reading about tony boarding schools and, to ingratiate himself with various other characters, repeatedly pretends that his reform school was a prep school. While Salinger's Holden Caulfield's one light in the dark tunnel of adolescence is his angelic sister Phoebe, Travis's is his aunt Delia, with whom, it transpires, he was sexually involved prior to his mysterious crime, arrest, and incarceration. In reform school, Travis kept a diary he calls his "Delia Book." The eminent creepiness of this project is not really explored in NIGHT LETTER. Instead, Travis tries to find his mother, gives up, and goes to Florida in search of Delia. When he gets there, he finds employment at a shrimp restaurant, a barely-legal girlfriend, a friendship with African-American chef Emil, and, of course, Delia. She, of course, has moved on. Can Travis move on? Will we find out why he was incarcerated? Will he find a reason to trust people?
NIGHT LETTER explores all those questions, telling the story from Travis's viewpoint in elegant, Salingeresque prose poetry. Watson endeavors to say something profound about American youth, race relations, politics, and--as his most prominent theme--the power of hope. At some points, the novel works. Watson is great at reconstructing the social life of the turbulent Johnson era and the cultural details that make central Florida unique. NIGHT LETTER's character development leaves more to be desired. The two women, Delia and Travis's girlfriend Dawnell, are both one-dimensional characters, and the novel ends in an upbeat way with an uplfiting message, only a few brief chapters after Travis witnesses a horrifically violent hate crime. His Japanese-American identity (his mother is Japanese-American, his father white) is also not explored in a way that seems consistent and convincing, That said, the mystery of Travis's backstory unfolds at a suspenseful pace and its ultimate resolution is intriguing. It's intriguing to see what, according to Watson, lies beneath 1960s America's literal and figurative swamps.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, December 2022
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