Night Watch
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips casts its unflinching lens on the impact of the Civil War on civilians and combatants. The novel alternates between the years 1874 and 1864. The Epilogue jumps to 1883.
The narrative opens in the first-person voice of young ConaLee. She is in a wagon with her mother, Eliza, and a sadistic veteran who calls himself “Papa.” Papa drops them off at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a place that treats the mentally ill humanely and with compassion. Papa gives ConaLee strict instructions to assume a new identity at the asylum: she is to pretend she is her mother’s maid and that her mother is a woman of quality suffering a mental breakdown. The two are admitted into the asylum where Eliza, mute after suffering years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Papa, gradually begins to regain her speech and recover.
The novel flashes back to Eliza’s husband, the father of ConaLee. A sharp shooter in the Union Army, he suffers a severe head injury. He recovers in the hospital but experiences memory loss. He does not recall any detail of his personal life, including his name. He is assigned the name John O’Shea by his doctor and is employed as the night watchman at the same lunatic asylum where Eliza and ConaLee reside. But he does not recognize them as his family.
Against the backdrop of the Civil War, Eliza and ConaLee experience a personal war, described in graphic detail. They had been terrorized by the drunk, tyrannical Papa who imprisoned them in their home. Eliza was repeatedly raped and impregnated. She temporarily lost her ability to speak as a result of her trauma. The Civil War, with its chaos, stench, blood, fear, and dismembered bodies on the battlefield, is vividly evoked in the John O’Shea sections. Equally vivid is O’Shea’s journey to recovery from his brain injury as he struggles to makes sense of shapes, sounds, and the world around him.
The novel is infused with some heart-wrenching, haunting scenes that encapsulate the horrors of rape and war in visceral detail. But where the novel truly excels is in its character portrayals. Each of the characters comes alive with a unique interiority and in a voice that is appropriate to the individual’s age, ethnicity, and social class. This is especially true of the memorable Deerbhla, an elderly neighbor who once served as Eliza’s Irish nursemaid and who continues to nurture and protect Eliza and ConaLee as best she can. And then there is Weed, a young boy whose ramblings are barely coherent as he scampers on the asylum grounds. And, finally, there is ConaLee, a teenager who is forced to grow up before her time, who has had to assume the mothering role for her mother and younger siblings, and who guides and nurtures her mother until her recovery.
An intense and engaging novel, skillfully executed, and well deserving of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.