Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips is a 276 standalone novel published by Knopf in 2023, and the winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Genre:

Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Synopsis:

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.

The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.

Opening Line:

I got up in the wagon and Papa set me beside Mama, all of us on the buckboard seat.

My Thoughts:

This book, the winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is stirring literary historical fiction. It tells the story of ConaLee and her family and the many ways their lives are affected by the Civil War.

The fighting has ceased, but not the grief.

The family includes a daughter of Irish immigrants working as indentured servants on a plantation, and the infant born of a slave raped by the master who can pass as white. When the latter leaves his pregnant wife to fight for the Union, he is obviously subjected to the horrors of war – but so are his family, left on the homestead to protect themselves from deserters from both sides of the war. After enduring the resulting traumas, ConaLee and her mother find sanctuary at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum of Weston, West Virginia, and its moral treatment regimen.

It’s common in these times. So many of our patients, all classes of society, find themselves sole survivors, nine years on, of our–national catastrophe. It is still–unspooling, O’Shea said, like malignant thread.

Important to note that this novel is written in a way that will turn some readers off. Dialogue is not in quotation marks. The flow of each paragraph meanders a bit. It worked for me, but it won’t for everyone. It is a very well researched book, and includes several photographs of the asylum as well as contemporary artwork of the Civil War era.

I greatly enjoyed this story overall, but the writing style did have me feeling rather distanced from the climax scene, making it much less impactful than it should have been, and I was underwhelmed by the ending as a result. But still 4.75 stars altogether!