THE HILL, by Harriet Clark
The premise sounds like a bad dream: Towering above your life stands a hill that you must keep ascending and descending forever. Or, to put the conceit of Harriet Clark’s breathtaking debut novel in more concrete terms: 8-year-old Suzanna pledges to visit, each week, the hilltop prison where her mother is serving a life sentence until that sentence is complete — to become a sort of secondary prisoner of her mother’s fate.
“The Hill” might be dreamlike, but it’s far from nightmarish, instead charged with a hushed quality of distillation, lustrous with the obscure meaning of familial romance, plus the sense — common to dreams — of promising some final understanding that can be carried into waking life.
Suzanna, who narrates the novel and who has the slightly spooky attentiveness of the gifted child, lives with her willful, ornery grandmother, a magnificent character who refuses not just to heed traffic rules (“the yellow and white lines on the road, like the signs beside the road, were suggestions, other people’s suggestions, and when had she given heed to other people’s suggestions?”) but, more shockingly, to see her imprisoned daughter.
For her part, the daughter accepts her incarceration with an equanimity verging on the mystical. This attitude is surely at odds with the militancy that led her to join a left-wing cell and drive the getaway car in a bank robbery that left a young security guard dead.
The author’s own mother, Judith, was a member of the Weather Underground, and for once it seems appropriate to bring a book’s acknowledgments into a review: Here Clark gratefully notes that her mother “wrote me a letter every week for almost 40 years, which amounts to a remarkable number of letters and can certainly be credited with teaching me what words can do.”
The result of that lesson is a novel of mutual devotion. Mother and daughter must find ways to live for themselves and each other while subjected to the former’s sentence. After Suzanna’s grandfather dies, she’s on her own in terms of visits (he’d been the one to drive and accompany her), and it’s then that she makes her vow: “At the prison considerable fanfare surrounded departures. But to not depart, it struck me then, was as great a feat as any. To stay by choice, not by curse. To return each week and rise again, to do this forever and ever. This was a feat I saw nowhere applauded and this was the challenge I set now for myself.”
Eventually, though, the challenge will involve relinquishing the child’s certitude of “forever and ever” and reckoning with an adult question: how to finally leave a parent behind and begin one’s own life?
Childhood, much like dreams, is difficult to write about without succumbing to vagueness and sentimentality; there’s also the unfortunate way it means so much more to the person who experienced it than to anyone else. There are none of those pitfalls here. Clark renders Suzanna’s state of unknowing exquisitely. When visiting her mother, Suzanna sometimes pretends to be asleep, or even dead; “and my mother and I were both happy — me playing dead to know nothing and my mother free to gaze upon me as long as she liked.” Yet Suzanna’s pensive passivity exasperates her legal guardian: “‘Do you go out of your way to know nothing?’ my grandmother continued to ask me and the answer continued to be yes.”
Part of Clark’s subtlety is the way in which the category of “what Suzanna refuses to know” remains undefined. Is it, as her grandmother would have it, full comprehension of her mother’s crime? Is it the realm of cold hard facts in general? Or is it nothing less than her own personhood, what with Suzanna’s self-curtailing commitment to remaining within visiting distance of the hill? Whatever the case, Suzanna’s mode of consciousness seems to grant her less quantifiable, more precious forms of knowledge. Even into her teenage years there’s a visionary quality to the way she experiences the world — as if she were a tiny, strange saint of a religion of her own devising.
All this numinousness isn’t to say that Clark can’t also be very droll. Consider, for example, the flock of captious old Commie dowagers who surround the grandmother and on whom Suzanna waits, obediently dispensing gin. These ostensible friends like to ask one another things like, “Remember, Sylvie, when you were a Nazi?”
Clark’s gifts for both the comic and the visionary reach their peak in a virtuoso, semi-hallucinatory passage toward the end of the novel. Facing death, the grandmother enlists Suzanna’s help in burning her personal effects. Even her wig is destined for the pyre — a wastebasket on the terrace. As Suzanna dutifully tosses it into the flames, an unholy vision presents itself: “The wig rose right out of the basket of its own accord, never seeming more like human hair than it did in that instant, hovering before us, burning, presenting itself, then sweeping over the railing, caught on its own fierce wind.”
Soon, with the wig transfigured into a kind of premature ghost of its owner, “my grandmother is looking at me and she is telling me everything: about her mother, her mother’s hair. …” The pages that follow, conjuring the affective lives of generations of women, are both dreamlike and the most exhilaratingly all-seeing of the book. In this sense, Suzanna is wide awake.
THE HILL | By Harriet Clark | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 276 pp. | $27
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