Night Watch

Marvelous historical fiction, with a large dose of reality. The characters are very well drawn. I felt drawn into their stories. There sadness made me sad.

I’m a Canadian in her 60s who studied what Americans would call AP History when I was 18. I have always been interested, saddened and fascinated with the psychosocial antecedents and impacts of your Civil War. My initial college education was English literature and journalism. I then retrained in late middle age as a nurse. For the past 12 years I have worked as a psychiatric nurse at a rural Canadian psychiatric hospital that is very old and quite similar to the Trans Allegheny. So this book obviously resonates personally. Even if it hadn’t, I am so moved by the beautiful evocative descriptions of country, landscape and place, and of the depth of the characters. I periodically make the drive from Canada to Florida and typically pass through W. Virginia. Next time I shall stop in Weston. Thank you JAP

This is a marvellous novel. Set in the chaotic, almost apocalyptic, aftermath of the American Civil War.A traumatised mother and her loving daughter seek refuge in a lunatic asylum in West Virginia.As one of the characters says: 'When the killing ends the grief goes on.'Fascinating characters and a powerful plot.Highly recommended.

A somewhat disturbing read. Especially for someone not familiar with the after effects of the civil war in the Unites States. The lawlessness, the animosity and the cruelty on full display.A difficult but eye-opening read.

Night Watch, a novel by Jayne Anne Phillips, this month won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It tells the story of women and anguish during the American Civil War and its aftermath, of mothers and surrogate mothers and widows caught in the killing of their husbands and children in battle. It is finally a story about a driven will to survive, to the breaking point, horrors that visit their lives. Men are not portrayed propitiously in this narrative.Phillips creates a specific reality for each of her characters and mixes their historical situations effectively. Husbands conscripted for war are lost to fighting. Families are sundered, in spirit or in fact. Without a male protector in isolated precincts, rape is a real fear, and vulnerability to theft a fact of life. Children are exploited and abused or rejected by mothers as spoiled by forceful parentage. Night Watch uncovers a world where women, codified by law as second-class citizens, must depend on men who shirk their duties and responsibilities. Laws promulgated to address injustice toward women and to protect their rights as citizens would come later. In 1874, the year of post-Civil War reconstruction used by Phillips, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded, and the political drive to outlaw alcohol commenced. In 1919 prohibition was ratified as the18th constitutional amendment in response to alcohol abuse disrupting domestic culture.Night Watch has a well-researched background for a fundamentally serious story on a serious topic set in America’s most serious history, the Civil War, and its aftermath. One fault of the narrative is an almost total lack of humor. Another is that the resolution suffers slightly but manifestly from contrivance. Against other virtues, this might be quibbling. In 1874 a woman at the edge of sanity is taken to a lunatic asylum because of horrifying circumstances and abuse. This is brilliantly and believably portrayed. Daughter ConaLee accompanies her mother, in a subterfuge that allows acceptance into the asylum, Eliza, now neurotically speechless and under the name of Miss Janet, finds sanctuary and safety. And more satisfying discoveries will eventually unfold.There is a buried intensity in how Jayne Anne Phillips writes. The Pulitzer Prize is focused on talent. Her sentences are sharp, paired; her scenes are vivid. Behind an obvious effort of research and story is a determination to serve art and life. This artistic fortitude makes the foundation for her entire novel.Though Phillips’s evocation of men as cowardly and morally evasive can weary as too unidirectional, her emphasis is historically accurate. She has a point. And she is writing history, not re-writing it. Using fiction as art’s way of expanding dimension and perspective, she speaks to what has become the clichéd, ignored, or even abandoned plight of women in our society. Her representation of what happened to her fictional characters in a carefully reconstructed account of a particular time resonates truth. The frangible nature of chance and fate for women during a war that took from them their men and boys is the undergirding theme of Night Watch. Jayne Anne Phillips has written her best novel so far, and it will stand. --Tom Casey