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A Novel
by Harriet Clark
Book Reviewed by:After her mother is sentenced to life in a hilltop prison, Suzanna vows to return to the hill forever. An unexpectedly funny and deeply moving novel about the many ways we punish and return to each other.
Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna's mother, who will never be released.
At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter's crime and refuses to visit the prison. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother's friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler-Stalin pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it.
Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever but her mother wants her to be free. Harriet Clark's The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the tale of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. The Hill brings new music to American fiction.
1
People got out in strange ways. No stranger, I suppose, than the ways they got in. One year an American military helicopter flew too low over an Italian ski village, killing two families headed up the lift. A woman at Hillcrest had Italian citizenship, and like that, her release became a reparation. Just like that it could happen. The ski-lift option.
When a woman went free, her friends and not-friends could watch from the north side of the mess hall to see her initial descent. But watching her was like watching that joke where a person stands behind a couch and pretends to walk down stairs that aren't there by crouching and crouching, then falling over. The women up top could watch the one woman descend and be gone, but she wasn't yet gone. She was on the parts of the hill that the women couldn't see, which were the parts of the hill my grandfather and I walked up and down each weekend.
"A good hill," my grandfather said to pause from climbing. Signal for us to stop, turn around, and ...
BookBrowsers Ask Zayd Ayers Dohrn, author of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young
Your book has been paired in some reviews with "The Hill," by Harriet Clark. It is a fictionalized version of her childhood visits to prison to see her mother, also a member of the Weather Underground, who was jailed for a botched robbery that led to the murder of a security guard. Have you read ...
-Jill_D1
It is a story centered around a place: Hillcrest Prison, where Suzanna visits her mother every Saturday for her entire childhood and adolescence. When she is very young, too young really to make such a promise, she vows she will never stop these weekly visits. Watching Suzanna's devotion play out over the span of many years is both crushing and, in some ways, exhilarating. She never wavers in her decision—the only time she does not visit for any substantial period of time is when her grandmother is dying and begs Suzanna to stay by her side. We see her experience some of the normal milestones of youth, such as hanging out in the park with friends for hours, with no particular agenda. But for the most part, The Hill is explicitly about the impossibility of carving out a normal life when your loved one is incarcerated. Or put another way, about how the abnormal becomes normal. I would be remiss not to note that the writing in this book is incredible and there is a great deal of humor, particularly in the grandmother's blunt speech and Suzanna's deadpan observations of the small world around her ("This rich woman had a face you could bang with a pole and nothing would happen")...continued
Full Review
(814 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Brandon Taylor, author of Minor Black Figures
The Hill is a tenderly Kafkaesque novel about the cruelties and absurdities of incarceration. A book of tremendous depth and feeling that manages to be equal parts comedy of coming of age and Sebaldian rumination. Lady Bird meets The Emigrants. I loved it. Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
Harriet Clark's The Hill orbits the endurance that attends faith and the daily, hourly, micro resiliencies which compose and conduct grace. Suzanna's visionary constancy—despite a phalanx of actors, human and institutional, conspiring against it—felt to me as morally urgent as anything in Dostoevsky. How is it possible for a book with such manifest stakes to also be this funny? This propulsive? I don't know how Clark wrote The Hill, but I'm glad she did. I'll be re-reading it for the rest of my life. Michael Cunningham, author of Day
The Hill is tragic, comic, gorgeously written, and overflowing with life; everything you hope a novel will be when you read its opening line. It's a rare experience when a novel not only fulfills those hopes, but transcends them. The fact that this is Harriet Clark's first novel is not only astonishing, it speaks to the greatest hope of all—that the future of American literature is in exceptional, inspired hands."
The Hill is very loosely based on author Harriet Clark's experiences as a girl visiting her mother, Judith Clark, in prison. Judith Clark's crime was driving a getaway car during the robbery of a Brink's truck that was making deliveries to banks. One guard and two police officers were killed. In the novel, Suzanna's mother went to prison for participating in a bank robbery. In both cases, the crime was politically motivated.
Judith Clark was a member of the Weather Underground, a Marxist guerrilla organization that branched off from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1969. On October 20, 1981 at 4pm, Judith and several others, including other members of the Weather Underground and members of the Black Liberation Army, ...
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