“Her mother had named her the name he’d taken – her given name a version of her surname. She was a hint, a riddle, a remembrance.”
Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Awards, Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch (Knopf 2023) is a powerful historical novel that echoes with Faulkner but with a feminine energy that hums throughout the pages. Set during and just after the Civil War, the novel beautifully and painfully captures what war did not just to the men who fought it, but to the women left behind.
Twelve-year-old ConaLee has watched her mother become a shell of the woman who’d raised her. She no longer speaks, no longer reads, and no longer plays with her daughter. Not only that, she also does not care for the children she continues to birth, and it is ConaLee’s responsibility to care for the little boy called Chap and the twins who are never named.
A man came to their cabin after the war, insisting everyone call him Papa and making himself at home. It’s not his first time at the cabin, but ConaLee was shielded from his first trip. Over and over and over again, he pushes ConaLee’s mother, a woman once called Eliza, further inside herself as he uses and abuses her body. He’s forbidden them from speaking with Dearbhla, the woman who’d raised both ConaLee’s mother and father, and there’s only so much her conjuring can do to save them after he gets his hooks in. But Dearbhla doesn’t give up, and Papa is “convinced” to take ConaLee and her mother to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia. By the time ConaLee realizes the permanency of the situation, the other children have been given away. The man called Papa instructs her that she is the caregiver of “Miss Janet”, and she becomes Nurse Eliza Connolly. He tells her then that he is not her father. Mother and daughter attempt to rediscover their lives while under the protection of the Asylum, and ConaLee struggles to come to terms with the children she’d left behind that her mother doesn’t remember.
But the Asylum isn’t just a safe haven for ConaLee and her mother; her real father also calls it home. As the novel unfolds, the reader learns the truth of who ConaLee’s father is, why he and Eliza fled with Dearbhla, and what happened to him during the war.
Night Watch is a novel of wreckage and resilience. And while some things that are lost can never be reclaimed, ConaLee, her mother, and her father, all learn how to move forward despite the painful scars that mar their bodies, minds, and souls.
Read this book.
*Thank you to the publisher for sending me not one but two finished copies. One will be added to my collection of favorites and the other will be sent out this week for another reader to enjoy.*
A Girl Named Tommi 