Jayne Anne Phillips’s National Book Award-nominated novel is a haunting story of resistance.
This novel follows 12-year-old ConaLee and her mother through the year 1874 as they struggle to recover from the long-lived traumas of the war. A bravura depiction of the Battle of the Wilderness is the only combat scene, and the war is a decade behind them, but its specter looms over civilians and soldiers alike. “They are still fighting the war in some of these towns,” warns John O’Shea, the eponymous Night Watch. “The fire is only banked.
It doesn’t matter to ConaLee which side anyone was on during the war; to her, secessionists and abolitionists “were all ragged, drifting men.” She was born after her father went to fight for the Union in 1861, leaving his pregnant wife in a farm high on a western Virginia mountain ridge whose isolation he thought would keep her safe. But as “Night Watch” opens in April 1874, ConaLee is in a wagon headed for the asylum with her devastated mother, who hasn’t spoken or risen from her bed in months.
Moving back and forth between 1864 and 1874, expertly shifting the narrative point of view among multiple characters, Phillips gradually reveals details about ConaLee’s father, how he and her mother came to that mountain ridge with Dearbhla, and what enabled Papa to catastrophically occupy their farm. Her plot is so carefully and engrossingly crafted that the enormous coincidence that brings ConaLee’s father into the 1874 action is believable.
Wendy Smith is a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Excellence in Reviewing citation and the author of “Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940.”
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