Book Review: Night Watch

(Borrowed and read on the Libby app on my phone) Jayne Anne Philips' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel reminded me of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The tale of a young girl and her mother seeking refuge in an insane asylum in post-Civil War West Virginia is told from multiple perspectives and exhibits flowery language to describe the hardscrabble, backwoods journeys of the characters from before, during an after the Late Unpleasantness Between the States. Philips' uses the story to develop her theme of the trauma inflicted by the war. Soldiers, parents, wives and children lose their identities and struggle to forge new ones by feigning madness or burying their memories. The mother, called Miss Janet, loses one husband to the war (he fights for the Union) and is later oppressed by a Southern deserter. The setting is also representative since West Virginia split from Virginia over the war and many WV residents still sympathized with the Confederacy. The conflict between Miss Janet and her two men reflects the national divide and comes to a tragic conclusion when they all meet in the asylum, along with Janet's daughter ConaLee who poses as her maidservant. All of the characters who also include Dearbhla, Miss Janet's neighbor and guardian angel, Dr. Story, head of the asylum, Miss Hexum, the motherly kitchen supervisor, and Weed, an orphan living at the asylum, are exceptionally well drawn.