Night Watch (5+*)

 

Individual goodness thrives, even in the worst of times.  That's my takeaway from Jayne Anne Phillips' densely written, melodramatic tale of the Civil War, set primarily in a West Virginia mental asylum where, one character observes, "it is still unspooling like a malignant thread."  Any relevance to contemporary America is purely intentional; almost prophetically, Night Watch won last year's Pulitzer Prize.

Star-crossed lovers, raised on a southern plantation but unaware they are related by blood, flee to the hollers of West Virginia with the older woman who has raised the young man from birth.  Dearbhla, whom some believe to be an Irish witch because of her expertise as an herbalist, dresses like a man and holds the all-too-common secret of the couples' origins close.  It does not diminish her love for their oddly named daughter.  As the story--which alternates between two time periods, separated by a decade--begins, ConaLee is accompanying her mother, a woman first known as Miss Janet, to an asylum run by a beneficent Quaker physician whose progressive ideas don't sit well with some of the entrenched staff.  Like Jesus, he turns out to be just a man, after all.  

Night Watch mostly concerns the women left behind by a character first introduced as the Sharpshooter who enlists to fight for the Union with a fervor that Miss Janet cannot comprehend.  What happens to her is no less traumatic than the brain injury suffered by the Sharpshooter who loses a piece of his skull (and most of his memory) in a battle described in detail so precise and confusing that the reader emerges with an unusually vivid sense of what it feels like to fight in a war.  

That feeling, however, seems familiar because the specifics of that experience have been depicted thousands of times in books and movies, unlike sexual assault.  Phillips and her boundless imagination give equally horrifying time to Miss Janet's consciousness while a Confederate deserter initially rapes her without using his penis.  Eventually, he returns for more assault of the conventional kind, initiating a years-long long nightmare that plagues ConaLee as well as the ever-resourceful Dearbhla.  News flash:  rape can be as different as the men who perpetrate it.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the author's metaphorical intentions, but the mental asylum where Miss Janet finds refuge--which actually existed--seems like the kind of place America ought to be.  Patients--who can be admitted for conditions as mild as "novel reading" and "politics"--are treated respectfully, humanely and fed a diet that would now be described as farm-to-table.  It's where the forces of good and evil finally come together under the watchful, mismatched eye of Weed, a foundling who nevertheless manages to thrive by adapting to his less-than-ideal circumstances, forming alliances and keeping his own counsel.

In Night Watch, Phillips appears to be showing her readers a path forward for a nation's untainted, sustained recovery once the man who cynically impersonates Abraham Lincoln has been vanquished.

Endurance was strength. The courage of the lost swelled and moved, a force separating the days, clearing the way.

We can hope.