Maybe you don’t care when it was that Conestoga wagons were all the rage, but Elizabeth Crook sure does. The Houston author of the historical novel The Night Journal is a fastidious fact-checker. “There’s never a Conestoga wagon where there couldn’t have been a Conestoga wagon,” she explains. “There are some authors that take great liberties with facts, and they seem to sleep just fine at night. I can’t do that.” She’s not kidding: The 400-page tome, Crook’s third, was ten years in the making. “I mistakenly believed that if I only placed part of it in the past I would only have to do half as much research,” she says. “This book, in fact, has been more than doubly hard to write.”
Night tells a chronologically fractured narrative in two distinct yet equally compelling voices. The first is a contemporary tale of emotional abandonment and rebellion between Meg, the narrator, and her domineering crone of a grandmother, Bassie. The other story unfolds in the diaries of Hannah, Bassie’s mother, who begins a new life in New Mexico during a time when train wrecks and tuberculosis, missions and massacres landscaped life in the territory.
When, during the contemporary tale, human remains surface during an excavation, the revered journals are called into question. The threads of the present unravel, then elegantly converge into a new history. Beware: With its gorgeous and often wry prose, Night could keep you up all night.
Thu., Feb. 9, 7 p.m.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2006.