Night Watch

Author: Jayne Anne Phillips

A lot of novels are inspired by some events and places in history. This one is based on the workings of a genteel lunatic asylum in rural West Virginia that was state of the art in the late nineteenth century. The [Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum](https://trans-alleghenylunaticasylum.com/) is located in Weston, West Virginia and is famous for being the largest hand-cut stone masonry structure in North America. It was designed to hold 250 patients, but the occupancy grew to ten times that amount in the hundred plus years that it was in operation. Today it is a National Historical Landmark. 

It was designed to be a therapeutic environment and followed the Kirkbride plan advocated by the famous Philadelphia psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride. Ms Jayne Anne Phillips is clearly a huge fan of Dr. Thomas Kirkbride and every chapter has a quotation from his seminal work “The Art of Asylum-Keeping”.

She uses the Civil War as a backdrop for her story and the novel starts out describing the difficult life of poor folks in rural West Virginia where most of the men-folk have disappeared to fight in the civil war. The women and children have to look after the property, raise many little children and put food on the table. They are exposed to all kinds of dangers including roving bandits who loot, rape and terrorize the local population.  From the horrors encountered in their daily lives, it is not hard to see how the lunatic asylum might be a better place.  And indeed, from Ms Jayne’s descriptions the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was a wonderful place that took care of upscale citizens.

The story has a few main characters starting with twelve-year-old ConaLee and her mother Eliza, who are dropped off at the asylum to seek refuge there. The novel then starts unraveling their back story by jumping all over the place. There’s Dearbhla who is the old woman that is like a mother to all the main characters in the book. She grinds up roots and herbs that can cure a variety of ills and also has some magical powers that can sense and influence the people around her. There’s a sharp-shooter who you are sure will have some role to play later in the book. Eevry book needs a villain and this one doesn’t even have a name. He is just called “Papa”. There’s a Dr. Story, the principal asylum doctor who’s name is based on the famous Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride who the author has clearly studied very extensively.

Overall, I am very surprised at how this book won the Pulitzer Prize.  The story line is very weak and most of the characters are poorly developed. Apart from learning how an asylum was run in the late nineteenth century, I got very little out of this book.