I consider Phillips to be among the greatest and most intuitive of American writers, and among the most undervalued despite her many prize nominations. This is true even though I’ve found nearly everything she’s written in the decades since “Black Tickets” and “Machine Dreams” to be a steep step down and, on a certain level, skippable.
Phillips’s work took a turn around the time of her second novel, “Shelter,” which appeared in 1994. Her work burrowed inward. It became more self-consciously literary and plainly Faulknerian, as if she had decided to abandon her gift for connection and deny her readers further rough pleasures. The bright and angry and vivid young women in her work, like Danner in “Machine Dreams,” gave way to blinkered perspectives: those of young children, of half-spectral beings or people damaged by life, most of them snails without their shells. Her novels no longer stared frankly at existence but gave us fleeting glimpses, to drag Roger Waters into this, out of the corners of people’s eyes.
When action did intrude, if was often excessive and exaggerated, like the young man at the end of “Lark and Termite” (2009) who rides his motorcycle Evel Knievel-style into the car of a moving freight train, thus saving the day.
“Night Watch” is Phillips’s sixth novel. It’s set in 1864 and 1874, near the end of the Civil War and in the war’s wake. The landscape is crawling with ragged, drifting, shellshocked, hungry, bitter, addled men. One of these men — we come to know him, sardonically, as Papa — finds his way to a ridge where a young woman named Eliza lives with her daughter, ConaLee. Further up the ridge is Dearbhla, their “granny neighbor,” who once lived on a slave plantation in the south. She’s a healer. She collects ginseng and makes powders and tinctures and God’s Eyes, and hangs cleaned bones from her porch rafters to catch good fortune.
Papa is a drinker, a thief and a rapist. Before long, in the face of his assaults, Eliza has entirely stopped speaking. Having taken everything he can from them, Papa drops mother and daughter at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. It’s a real place, and an enormous one, in Weston, W.Va. Though it’s now a tourist site, it has lost none of its haunting grandeur. The doctors believed in “moral treatment,” and once there Eliza and ConaLee begin to thrive before old devils threaten anew.
