NIGHT WATCH by Jayne Anne Phillips

This book just does not measure up, despite its Pulitzer Prize, to this author’s Lark and Termite and Quiet Dell, both of which I loved.  The two timelines, 1864 and 1874, are very well delineated, but the characters are somewhat one-dimensional—either all good or all evil. It takes place in West Virginia and opens with an 1874 section in which “Papa,” whose true colors will be revealed later, is delivering Eliza and her daughter ConaLee to a plush mental health asylum.  He instructs them to use false names and not reveal their mother/daughter relationship. When we revert to ten years earlier, we find that Eliza’s beloved husband has left his family to become a sharpshooter in the Union army.  Their surrogate caretaker will be Dearbhla, their “granny neighbor,” who raised Eliza’s husband and, to some degree, Eliza herself.  I liked the plot, but, honestly, this book put me to sleep, as the plot seems secondary to all the wordy descriptions and characters whose purpose is unclear, particularly in the asylum. The most glaring example is a boy named Weed who wanders the grounds and pops up in scene after scene. However, I could not decipher what he contributed to the storyline.  Maybe he, the cook, another inmate and a few employees are meant to add color to the ambience of the asylum, but they are just not that colorful.  ConaLee, Eliza, a doctor, a raging inmate, and, of course, the night watch, all have important roles, but the rest of the asylum characters occupy way too many pages whose objective seems to be to extend the length of the book.  Does a novel need to be a minimum length to win the Pulitzer for fiction?  Also, there is a bit of magical realism that is used to glue some events together.  Surely an author of this caliber could have come up with a better device.