RUN FOR THE HILLS, by Kevin Wilson
When people speak of “found” family, they tend to mean those closest to them who are not related by blood or by law. One might hear the phrase used by a queer person who has found love and acceptance far, far away from their parents, or a member of a church who finds more treasured community through worship than they can at home. But in “Run for the Hills,” Kevin Wilson’s latest novel, the term can be deployed more literally. If a man sets out on a cross-country road trip to find all of his half siblings and the father who abandoned them one by one, what have they all done if not … found family?
Wilson, whose past novels include “Perfect Little World” and “Nothing to See Here,” is known for his idiosyncratic, at times fantastical family stories, but “Run for the Hills” is something a little more straightforward. It begins in Tennessee, where 32-year-old Madeline “Mad” Hill operates a successful organic farm with her mother. One Saturday in March, a 44-year-old writer named Reuben “Rube” Hill arrives from Boston with some shocking news: He is her half sibling, and she has two more, their father having abandoned Rube, and then Mad, and then two more families after that. He invites her on a road trip to meet and collect the others so the four of them can confront their father together in California, where Rube believes he currently resides.
Mad has never thought to search for her father, let alone had the time to. “He left,” she tells Rube. “He didn’t want to stay. He doesn’t deserve my thinking of him.” But after decades of keeping him out of her mind, the seed planted by her half brother sprouts in a near instant, and she accepts his bizarre offer. Before long, they’re off into the American West at lightning speed — or, as fast as his rented PT cruiser is able to go.
It’s a fantastic hook that begins a mostly jaunty series of cascading episodes that feel tailor-made to be adapted into a limited series. “Another quest,” Wilson writes. “Mad wanted to scream. Always another quest, some other thing that they had to accomplish, some mountain to traverse or some insane billionaire heiress to humor. The further you get into the quest, no matter how long it continues, you can’t leave it. You’re too far into it.”
If it wasn’t already clear from the PT Cruiser, it is 2007, one of the last gasps of an era before hyper-connectivity was the norm. Set in the present, such a story may not have warranted unscheduled, in-person confrontations, and the road trip could have been replaced with a Zoom conference. It wasn’t all that long ago when human connection was more reliant upon, well, human connection.
Their journey takes them first to Oklahoma and then to Texas, where their half sister, Pepper, is competing in a college basketball tournament. With her in the back seat they head to Utah for 11-year-old Theron, a fifth grader and budding filmmaker who joins the unlikely trio with little protestation from his mother.
If the ease with which Rube is able to persuade his siblings to join him raises eyebrows, the journey is otherwise so swift and delightful that the story never collapses under the weight of implausibility. It is a pleasure to watch Rube, Mad, Pep and Theron discover everything they have in common — with one another and with the versions of their father that each child got to know — as the odometer rolls up and up. Rube became a mystery novelist, as his father had been when he was a child. Mad is a farmer, as her father had been when she knew him. The reader wonders if their mutual faith in hideous cars driven by strangers isn’t a contrivance at all, but a familial trait.
Of the siblings’ many mishaps, the most poetic occurs when they’re forced to swap rental cars after an accident. Whatever glimmer of hope they have that the new vehicle will be something more exciting than the PT Cruiser is dashed when the agent delivers a similarly hideous Chevrolet HHR. Their father has spent a lifetime driving off from family after family; and here they are, bound together in a revolving door of ugly cars designed for America’s large, nuclear families. The agent presents the option as — what else? — an upgrade.
“Run for the Hills” is a touching and generous romp of a novel, a sort of lighthearted family heist in which the anticipated grift is simply a meeting (or confrontation?) with the characters’ father. The results of their quest are, frankly, beside the point. In bringing the siblings together — with or without the man who helped create them — Wilson makes a bold and convincing case that every real family is one you have to find and, at some point, choose, even if it’s the one you’re born into.
RUN FOR THE HILLS | By Kevin Wilson | Ecco | 244 pp. | $28.99
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