The Night Journal

With its family secrets and hallowed texts containing explosive truths, The Night Journal suggests A. S. Byatt’s Possession transplanted to the raw and beautiful landscape of the American Southwest. Meg Mabry has spent her life oppressed by her family’s legacy—a heritage beginning with the journals written by her great-grandmother in the 1890s and solidified by her grandmother Bassie, a famous historian who published them to great acclaim. Until now, Meg has stubbornly refused to read the journals. But when she concedes to accompany the elderly and vipertongued Bassie on a return trip to the fabled land of her childhood in New Mexico, Meg finally succumbs to the allure of her great-grandmother’s story—and soon everything she believed about her family is turned upside down.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Small Book Club, 2008-10-16
We tried this book for our small club, and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Well written...good character development...a good story.


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Set aside a couple days...you will be reading this every moment you can spare!, 2008-10-15
This is an engrossing story within a story. You will be kept wondering and wanting to have all of your questions answered so that you will NOT want to stop reading until you finish! A really different story...not predictable, as many plots are. I want to read more from this author!


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Mixed feelings on this one, 2007-12-02
An older woman, Claudia Bass, has made her mother's journals famous by publishing them - Dr. Bass is a noted historian and scholar. And she is mean as a snake...Her granddaughter, Meg Mabry, and she are at odds mostly, maybe they are too alike and don't acknowledge that in each other - Meg has refused to read the famous journals. Maybe to irritate her grandmother, maybe not wanting to know more....
When people in New Mexico start digging to construct an addition to their building, Bassie, as Claudia is known by all, has a fit - that the hill they will unearth has the bones of her parents' dogs and she refuses to allow that to happen. She decides to go to New Mexico and fight them. In the end, Meg accompanies her.
So starts a journey of discovery. Childhood memories - innocent and trusting - but do they hold the truth?
The Night Journals - fact or whitewashed versions of reality?
The love of Hannah Bass (Bassie's mother), her husband Elliot, and their friendship with Vincente Morales interact with actual history - bringing in Mexican-American tensions, Indian relations, and even Teddy Roosevelt!
All intermix with the present and sometimes the past is better off as is, because what you remember and what is reality, may be radically different and would you be prepared to learn truths about adored relatives?
Lives parallel - Meg and Jim, Hannah, and her men...
An interesting novel - moving...slow at the start, but it builds up to and interesting read.
When I was a child, I was so struck by 2 books about journals I wrote in journals for years - AnneMarie Selenko's Desiree and Bram Stoker's Dracula - talk about polar opposites! But the strength of their words, got me to write my heart's feelings on paper, journal after journal.
Will The Night Journal influence some little girl to do the same?
A good read.


11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

History trumps romance, 2007-07-27
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).


6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

I must have missed something, 2007-07-25
This novel reads like a second rate mass market dimestore romance. The journal references are unbelievably contrived, and the thin plot is padded with uneccessary and uninteresting copy. Where was the editor? I am an avid reader, but cannot imagine how this novel can appeal to anyone who enjoys reading well-crafted, provocative material. Although I am on page 292, I will probably abandon this book in favor of Cormac McCarthy's new book "The Road", that I purchased the same day. I am angry with myself for wasting as much time on it as I have already.

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