“Nightwatch” by John Leax

From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel. He writes in his Grace Is Where I Live: Writing as a Christian Vocation that for years he had wanted to be a novelist, not a poet, but it took him a long time to learn (from writers like Flannery O’Connor, who said it directly) that fiction wasn’t about writing about ideas but about people and story. 

Leax’s one novel was written for young adults. Nightwatch (1989) is the story of Mark Baker, a boy growing up in a small town. It’s told in disconnected segments – Mark as a young boy, at age 11 or 12, and as a teen. His parents are both people of faith, but Mark is wayward, falling in with friends who tend to lead him further away. But all of Mark’s experiences across the years are leading him directly (and sometimes indirectly) into the arms of God. And he fights it the entire time, until he can no longer fight.

 

John Leax

It may sound like a familiar story, but Nightwatch isn’t that at all. It contains an edge, a jaggedness that you wouldn’t expect in a young adult novel or a Christian young adult novel. But Leax had taken O’Connor’s advice to heart, and he told a story about people as opposed to ideas. And he let his characters, and especially the character of Mark, to go where they might go.

 

Leax’s poetry collections include Reaching into Silence, The Task of Adam, Sonnets and Songs, and Country Labors. His non-fiction writing and essay collections include Grace Is Where I Live, In Season and Out, Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism, 120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About, and Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World. 

 

In some ways, Nightwatch is difficult to read (thus my comment about jaggedness). But it reads like a real story about a real boy, a boy capable of stupidity and hurting others, a boy who’s running as fast as he can away from God but (very) slowly comes to realize he’s not getting away. 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Writing in the Middle of Things – Andrew Roycroft at The Sounding Board.

 

The disappeared and the damned: A reflection on Roger Scruton’s neglected “grooming gangs” novel – Henry George at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Bridges of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

 

Shrouded Veterans: Honoring the Highest-Ranking Jewish Officer Killed in Action – Frank Jastrzembski at Emerging Civil War.

 

Richard Weaver: The Conservatism of Piety – John East at The Imaginative Conservative.