Book Review :: Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips
Review by Kevin Brown
Jayne Anne Phillips’ latest novel, Night Watch, is set in and around the Civil War, as sections take place in 1864 and 1874, with an epilogue in 1883. However, very little of the novel actually occurs in what most readers would think of as the Civil War. There’s only one battle scene, and there is little mention of slavery. Instead, Phillips is interested in the effects of the war, not just on those who fought in it, but on those whose lives are more peripheral to it.
The plot follows Eliza and her daughter ConaLee, as they try to survive while their husband and father, respectively—whose name the reader doesn’t learn until near the end of the novel—is away fighting. They live in rural West Virginia, so they have ConaLee’s grandmother (of sorts, it’s complicated), Dearbhla, living nearby to help, but they are largely isolated otherwise. A Confederate soldier appears in the 1864 section, but his real effect only shows up in the 1874 sections of the novel, as he has taken over the house and family, forcing them to refer to him as Papa. He ultimately has Eliza institutionalized in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, with ConaLee pretending to be her attendant.
The novel reminds the reader of the traumas that women endured, but also that they continue to endure, especially at the hands of men. Even in the best times of their life, Eliza and ConaLee are largely dependent on men and the decisions they make. Phillips shows the effect of that trauma—and the larger traumas of the war—through characters repeatedly having their names taken from them or having to change their names. At the asylum, for example, Eliza becomes Miss Janet, while ConaLee becomes Eliza Connolly; Eliza’s husband becomes John O’Shea for a time when he loses his memory of who he was. At one point in the novel, Phillips writes, “…the past is the present unrecognized.”
While Night Watch is clearly about the Civil War, it’s also about the lack of freedom and traumas women continue to endure, the present reality that so many are unable or unwilling to recognize.
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips. Alfred A. Knopf, September 2023; Vintage, February 2025. Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
