Customer Reviews

The Night Journal

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This novel of four generations of women is so intricately structured that they all seem to be living at one time, together, fighting, arguing, loving, digging deeply into what becomes a history shared by the living and the dead.

Hannah's journals from over a hundred years ago are astounding, so full of life and curiosity and sensual, doomed love that you think she's sitting there reading them to you herself. And that there hasn't been a more compelling character in literature for ages. ("I wanted nothing but to break the barriers," she writes--and does she!) Yet when her daughter, Bassie, starts to talk, and snarl, and argue, you feel she's worthy of Dickens. Bassie and Meg go at each other with a kind of vicious tenderness that only blood and family can bring to bear.

And the men...the men these women love. All are strong. All are deeply flawed. And each is worthy of the passion he inspires. Hannah's yearnings in particular are so intense that she finds them "despotic in the night" (lovely phrase, never mind how apt in terms of the novel's title) and must send herself literally into exile from her desire. Meg, who lives in, and must try to emerge from, the shadow of the women she was born from ("she felt a need to be rid of the past, unwillingly captured by it"), falls in love like the cerebral, conflicted character she is, hesitantly, confusedly, compellingly.

THE NIGHT JOURNAL combines the sweep of an epic with the intimacy of a love story. It has horrendous train wrecks (you want to turn your eyes away) and appalling massacres and monumental feats of engineering and intricate details of archeology and beautiful scenery in the midst of which its characters fall into forbidden, tragic love.

Elizabeth Crook has attempted, and accomplished, a vastly ambitious work of fiction. You will lose yourself in this book, and in the process find a precious, unforgettable work of narrative art.

If you enjoy story lines that connect the contemporary world with its history, read this book. The characters, both modern and turn of the twentieth century, will engage you and move you. The history is well integrated into the story line, and I found myself completely swept up in the lives and events that unfold in this very well told story.
The author reveals so much of the pain and conflict that accompanied the growth of the American southwest and relates it to individuals as well as to politics, environment, and the study of the past through journals, letters, and archeology. A moving love story, family saga, political expose--a great read. If you like this one, you will also like A Map of Love, by Adhaf Soueif, which uses similar devices to explore these themes in the setting of Egypt.

Meg Mabry is a 37-year-old biomedical engineer devoted to her work maintaining dialysis equipment. Her love life is less than spectacular. Meg suffers migraines and has dissociated herself from life in general in an attempt to maintain some sort of control. Over-shadowing everything Meg does is her domineering maternal grandmother, Claudia Bass, known as Bassie to her fans. Bassie is a respected author and historian, a once beautiful woman still trying to paint a fresh face over her wrinkled one. Documenting her mother Hannah's life from journals has always been Bassie's raison d'etre. Nina Witte is Meg's much-married mother. Being between husbands is a chronic condition for Nina. Bassie raised Meg because Nina's alcoholism and penchant for men interfered with child rearing.

Bassie is curmudgeonly, opinionated, and demanding. She resents her advanced age and failing health and focuses much of that resentment on Meg. Meg grudgingly juggles her job and Bassie's needs but stubbornly refuses to do the one thing that would please her grandmother - read Hannah Bass's journals about life in New Mexico. When Bassie is forced to travel to her birthplace in New Mexico, she asks Meg to accompany her.
Meg refuses at first but finally gives in. Bassie would drive a saint to drink, but despite her pretenses to the contrary, Meg loves her. What both women discover in New Mexico alters their world in stunning ways.

In New Mexico, voices from the past seem more real than those in the present. In fact, the present seems like a pale imitation of life when Meg finally starts reading Hannah Bass's journals. Hannah was a woman of sensuality and strength, a skilled chronicler of life in the Desert Southwest and Victorian era. Hannah's courtship and marriage to Elliott Bass and her friendship with Vicente Morales enthrall Meg. Elliott is intense and self-assured, a railway engineer and secretive man who loves Hannah with passion. Despite that love, and his devotion to their daughter Bassie, Elliott is gone from home for long periods of time. Hannah's journaling ends when she
dies at age 31 of consumption, but Meg and Bassie discover key parts of her story remain untold. Truths lie buried in the desert southwest. Shocking mysteries are revealed. And Meg finally learns the importance of genuine love and family ties.

I loved this book, every word of it. The past lives through Hannah's journals and melds itself inextricably with the present. If The Night Journal is an example of Elizabeth Crook's work, I want to read more.

What in heck does that mean? The story, supported by well-developed, but not always likable characters, was fresh and intriguing in varying degrees throughout. The settings were real and came alive through very satisfying description. Intriguing in varying degrees - one moment, I was reading with purpose, the next, I was quite content to put the book down - and not return to the story for days. What does that say? It wasn't moving fast enough; it wasn't delivering enough mystique to keep me turning pages. I enjoyed the story. I got a bit tired of Bassie's consistently cantankerous behavior - well-explained, to be sure, but tiring in the reading experience. Oh, to see more of her softer side and less of poor Meg's hopelessness.
You know how you feel when you've read a real humdinger? You can't wait to tell your friends about it, recommend it to friends of like appetite - and in my case, to file it on that special shelf of "keepers", to be re-read in my old age. Not this one, I'm afraid. After reading that last page, I was consumed with the opinion that this story could have been told in about 100 less pages. Some people love it when the author uses 1000 words to describe something that could benefit just as well from a well chosen 50. Not me - so I'm feeling relieved to have finished The Night Journal so I can move on to something more stimulating...and captivating!

I loved this book. The writing is beautiful and heartbreakingly moving, and the characters are unforgettable, rendered with such sympathy and poignancy that I began to feel for them as I would for cherished friends. As the story unfolds, I found myself more and more absorbed by the two worlds depicted, and stayed up all night reading to finish it. From the start, Meg's journey is completely compelling, as she begins her long-delayed search for and acceptance of her family's famous past and how it has shaped her own life. As Meg reads her great-grandmother Hannah's journals, Hannah's experiences as a Harvey girl in turn-of-the-century New Mexico unfold and provide a riveting- though sometimes painful- depiction of her life and those times. The contemporary and historical stories flow together seamlessly, as the journals provide clues to the mystery Meg uncovers when she travels to the family's old homeplace in New Mexico. The Night Journal is a love story, a family saga, a page-turner mystery, and a keen and insightful exploration of how we come to be who we are.

I lived with Meg and Bassie and Hannah all weekend--couldn't stop reading. I loved Night Journal! Gripping, insightful, and funny too; a mystery with endless surprises, most dealing with relationships (the essence of mystery?); and history at its best, a connecting backdrop for our lives. I felt like a Harvey Girl, I breathed the Pecos air, I miss Bassie--and Jim. An edge-of-your-seat action drama set in a meticulously researched historical background, it still has me thinking.

There are at least two stories here. One is that of Hannah Troy Bass, who came to New Mexico in the 1890s and left a series of journals which, as edited by her daughter Claudia ("Bassie"), became famous as an authentic record of frontier life. The other is the present-day tale of the now-elderly Bassie returning to New Mexico with her thirty-something granddaughter Meg to supervise some archaeological excavations around her mother's old home. For a long time, the older story is more interesting than the modern one; Hannah's voice speaks from the page with an immediacy that makes Meg pale by comparison. It is clear that a lot of research has gone into this, and the reader is caught up in historical events as in the trivia of daily life.

About halfway through the book, there is a gear change and the modern story takes center stage. But the transition is poorly handled, many of the revelations are predictable, and the genre shifts uncomfortably between historical novel, romance, mystery story, and -- perhaps most interesting -- a study of the bonds and tensions within families. These may be too many balls for the author to juggle. I found myself getting interested in Meg and her feelings only to end in frustration, and the final sections of Hannah's journal make for very unpleasant reading that no amount of plot resolution can make palatable.

One can understand the recent popularity of books that confront present-day characters with records from a past age.* The device expands the scope and implications of the novel, allowing the author to write about people whose lives have something in common with those of the readers, without reducing the whole action to a humdrum level. It also addresses one of the prime functions of the modern novel, which is to make sense of the present existence in relation to the past. But it is also a difficult structure to bring off, without making one narrative seem constructed merely as a prop for the other one, or allowing the more vivid of the two to eclipse the paler. The danger can be reduced by strong characters and meticulous research, but good history always trumps merely competent fiction.

*Some examples, almost at random: John Darnton's THE DARWIN CONSPIRACY, Umberto Eco's THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA, Janathan Safran Foer's EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, Dara Horn's THE WORLD TO COME, Nicole Krauss' THE HISTORY OF LOVE, and Jennifer Vanderbes's EASTER ISLAND (probably the closest parallel to THE NIGHT JOURNAL).

I enjoyed The Night Journal. It was set in two places that I love, Austin and New Mexico, and captured the texture of each. The history was fascinating. I'd never read of the Mormon massacre or considered the history of the trains and the engineering/surveying and was truly engaged when reading these passages.

The multigenerational story was well done. The women were wonderfully portrayed with all their flaws & it was a pleasure to find a book written by a woman with some decent male characters.

Some of the story was predictable, but that didn't make it any less readable. It is really hard to put this book down, so find some time to savor Elizabeth Crook's beautiful writing and enjoy a true storyteller's art.

Elizabeth Crook has blended the present with the past to create a seamless story of the conflict of four generations of the Bass family. The journals have the musty smell of age, historical accuracy, and authenticity. The author has scrupulously researched her material to the point where fact and fiction fuse to create a mesmerizing novel.

It took me a month to read this book, because I read only a little bit every day. I understand it took 10 years to write, so I'm glad I took the time to enjoy it. I felt like I had been living the story along with the characters. I would love to give it 4 and a half stars, because I really enjoyed the story.

I am very familiar with the locations in the story and much of the history. I have visited the newly renovated Montezuma "castle" as it is now called. I believe the stories of the local people are quite accurate, and I wish I knew how much of the story is based on real events in history. The Pecos ruins are a haunting place and a great setting for a "mystery". I have also been to Juarez many times during my youth.

The story does indeed haunt me. It all seems so real. I have only 2 small complaints. At times the writing gets a bit too tedious and bogs down while I want to say "come on get to the point". I also think the scenes in Juarez are a bit too tidy; that is a huge metropolis and finding just the person we want to know in one day is a little bit too coincidental. But I want it to be possible so I can believe the story.