Night Watch.

Jayne Anne Phillips’ newest novel Night Watch was, as far as I can tell, a surprise winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in two senses: I saw nothing that anticipated its win, and I think it sucks. It is a ponderous, pretentious, pointless, predictable piece of fiction that was an absolute chore to finish and offered far too modest a payoff for the effort required to complete it.

The setup to the plot of Night Watch is far more complex than the plot itself, as if Phillips knew she had a scant concept and decided to mask it with time-shifting, insufficient use of quotation marks, and avoidance of pronouns. A man takes a woman who has stopped speaking for several years and her 12-year-old daughter to a West Virginia asylum several years after the end of the Civil War, cautioning the girl that he is not her father and telling her the story she needs to relate at the asylum to gain admittance for herself and her mother. The girl’s actual father went to fight in the War but never returned and the family received no word of his fate. From there, we jump back and forth to find out who the man was, why the woman stopped speaking, and what happened to the father, before we get to a conclusion that you can see coming from the first fifty pages, if not sooner.

This book thinks it has a lot to say, and that might be its worst attribute, even beyond the leaden, torpid prose and the meager characterization. (It also contains a long, graphic scene of sexual assault that stood out as one of the only scenes in the novel that has that level of detail about anything happening to any of the characters.) There could be a larger point here about the treatment of women during and in the aftermath of the Civil War, and how conflicts tend to save their worst impacts for the most vulnerable populations, such as women and children, which would seem to have a rather apt parallel today in Gaza. There could be something here about the poor treatment of the war wounded and the insane of that era. There could be any number of themes here if Phillips had the insight into the subject to lead the reader there, but she doesn’t. It revels in the misery of its setting like Andersonville, another Pulitzer winner about the Civil War – the judges for that award just can’t seem to resist that setting – without saying anything meaningful about any of it.

The characters are the book’s second major failing, as Phillips seems almost determined to prevent the reader from getting to know any of them. The man never gets a name beyond “Papa,” a sort of cruel joke in the circumstances. The father gets a name that isn’t his own, only after he’s wounded and loses his memory. The mother and daughter each have two names, their own and the false identities they assume when they enter the asylum. There’s also a woman and a horse who are both named Dearbhla, in case you weren’t confused already. They’re all thinly drawn enough that they exist only as one-dimensional villains (Papa) or victims (the mother and father) or sort of impossible fairies (the daughter). The daughter, named ConaLee but known at the asylum as Miss Eliza Connolly, is the closest character here to a protagonist, and is certainly its hero, yet she is a cipher inside her outlines: We only see her as her world has made her, never as who she is as a person.

The sum of these disparate parts may leave you rooting for any sort of happy ending for the central characters, and of course Phillips could not give you one – nor does this novel need one, to be clear. She simply chose the cheapest way out, rather than resolving the plot’s various threads in a way that actually says something about their lives or their time or, as is written in the guidelines for the Pulitzer committee, “dealing with American life.” That this was chosen over North Woods or Tom Lake is appalling, the second massive whiff in three years by the Pulitzer committees for the fiction award after 2021’s mind-boggling selection of The Netanyahus, which really hasn’t aged well. A great novel will justify its existence through its story, its prose, and its characters. Night Watch does none of the above.

Next up: Oliver Roeder’s Seven Games: A Human History.