NIGHT WATCH, by Jayne Anne Phillips
Jayne Anne Phillips’s new novel, “Night Watch,” about a woman and her daughter in a genteel asylum in West Virginia around the time of the Civil War, is sludgy, claustrophobic and pretentious. Each succeeding paragraph took something out of me.
It hurts to say this because my feelings about her work are, more so than usual, personal. Two of Phillips’s early books — the story collection “Black Tickets” (1979) and especially the novel “Machine Dreams” (1984) — mean more to me, I’d guess, than any fiction published in the last 50 years. I’ve read each five or six times. They more than live up to their ideal titles.
I have a sense of my own fallibility when writing about Phillips’s work because, like her, I’m from West Virginia. My grandfather, Archie, was a coal miner. I fear I am granting her, intellectually and emotionally, a home-field advantage.
“Machine Dreams” catches, in a way no other novel has, the heavy inner life, the sensorium, the vibe of West Virginia — the feel of old Elks lodges, where your grandparents danced and fell in love, the combined smells of axle grease and gasoline and grass, the roads that cling preposterously to the sides of mountains, the empty parade grounds and public swimming pools in vague disrepair, the men with big square hands, the coal tipples, the deep family ties, the young men bound for the military or the mines, the ambitious young women who get out and then miss the landscape every second. “Machine Dreams” has more to say about the promises and betrayals of sex, rock music, travel and politics than nearly any novel of its time. It catches the undertaste of loneliness that can attend even life’s big moments. It puts a lump in my throat from its first pages. If this review causes even a minor run on “Machine Dreams,” it will have done enough.
