Harriet Clark’s Début Is a New Kind of Coming-of-Age Novel

Now a 3rd joins their company, Harriet Clark’s superb archetypal novel, “The Hill” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It is narrated by Suzanna, who lives with her grandparents successful New York City. Nearly each weekend—first with her grandfather, past with a nun named Sister Claudine, and, finally, erstwhile she’s astir a teen-ager, connected her own—Suzanna makes a travel retired of municipality to sojourn her parent successful a hilltop prison. Only gradually does it look that her parent is serving a precise agelong condemnation for her relation successful a slope robbery that resulted successful the decease of a information guard. Clark’s caller is simply a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman. It has the signifier and accent of a coming-of-age communicative but is devoid of the accustomed content. We spot Suzanna done her processing phases—at nine, astatine twelve, astatine fifteen, and past astir to postgraduate from precocious school, a play erstwhile “a large venturing distant had commenced” (though not for Suzanna, who does not use to college). People dispense proposal to our heroine of the benignant that 1 encounters successful stories decently poised connected the cusp of life. Suzanna’s grandma tells her, “We’ll person to spot however you crook out.” Suzanna’s parent intones, “All kids permission their mother . . . children leave. They’re expected to.” She writes imploringly from prison, “If you fig retired a mode to beryllium happy . . . it changes everything.”

But wherever would Suzanna go? And however could she permission her mother, if her parent near her first? Besides, similar the young sisters successful “Housekeeping,” Suzanna is lone faintly socialized. Her begetter is not successful the picture; she seems to person nary schoolhouse friends; she is astatine the mercy of her eccentric and willful grandparents. Clark’s caller is thing of a tribute to Robinson’s. She gives Suzanna’s parent and grandma the aforesaid names that Robinson gives her book’s parent and aunt (Helen and Sylvie), and she likes to commencement sentences with Robinson’s grandly suppositional “Say” (in the benignant I channelled earlier: “Say that a quality beingness is simply a metaphysical experiment”). More important, Robinson seems to person shown Clark however to constitute astir a miss whose parent is absent (in “Housekeeping,” the parent kills herself) but whose destiny rests with elders truthful absorbed successful their ain intricate dramas of departure that their young complaint feels abandoned doubly over, by 2 generations of absconding guardians.

Like Robinson, Clark gets immoderate drama retired of the morbid whimsy (so it seems to Suzanna) of the precise old. For 1 thing, the aged person an inconvenient wont of dying. It’s foolish, Suzanna laments, “to person attached myself to the radical of radical slightest apt to instrumentality around.” First to spell is Suzanna’s grandfather, who had accompanied her for years connected her play situation visits. (Her grandma has taken “a vow of absence” and ne'er goes to spot her daughter.) Suzanna views the satellite with a benignant of jealous estrangement, refusing to marque consciousness of fundamentals specified arsenic death. She has divided others into “those who permission and those who stay,” and her grandfather’s departure simply puts him successful the incorrect camp. Here, Clark’s caller offers a beautifully subtle representation of childish unsubtlety: “One time it was unbelievable that a idiosyncratic would die, and different time we believed it. A alteration successful him oregon successful us.”

“Just accidental they’re the top pancakes. You don’t request to adhd ‘of these United States.’ ”

Cartoon by Lars Kenseth

Even erstwhile not dying, the older procreation has a marked endowment for disappearance. Sylvie, Suzanna’s grandmother, is astatine the bosom of the book: stubborn, abrupt, vengeful, wounded, and wounding. Also, wildly amusing. Her erratic driving, for instance, stems from her condemnation that the lines connected the roadworthy are specified suggestions, “and erstwhile had she fixed heed to different people’s suggestions?” Furious astatine her imprisoned daughter, Sylvie punishes her near-at-hand granddaughter with different benignant of imprisonment: a imaginativeness of the satellite arsenic an implacably hostile zero-sum game, successful which everyone is sidesplitting 1 another. Your mother’s choices “killed your grandfather,” Sylvie tells Suzanna. And present “you’re sidesplitting me.” Sylvie is haunted by what she sees arsenic her daughter’s selfish desertion of Suzanna arsenic a baby: erstwhile she chose to rob the bank, she tells her granddaughter, “she held you and looked astatine you and past she enactment you down and near you forever.” Now Sylvie metes retired the aforesaid punishment connected Suzanna: “Punishment comes successful galore forms, and my grandmother’s preferred signifier was banishment. My removal oregon hers, expulsion oregon disappearance.” One day, Sylvie takes Suzanna, property nine, to the slope that her parent robbed, forces her to spell wrong connected her own, and past inexplicably drives away. Suzanna understands this peculiar acquisition to beryllium that “the statement of my household was neither destined to beryllium nor destined to last.” Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t person to sojourn your mother, she says. But I bash person to, Suzanna replies. “According to who?” Sylvie asks. “You don’t adjacent person to spell to school.” Fed connected motivation scraps, the kid indispensable find her ain meaning connected which to subsist.

With the objection of the punitive sojourn to the bank, Suzanna’s grandma does not sermon her daughter’s transgression oregon her reasons for committing it. “What your parent did” is Sylvie’s smothering précis; “your parent took it excessively far” is her grandfather’s milder version. This whitethorn good echo the benignant of rationed sermon that the writer heard erstwhile she was increasing up with her ain grandparents. But it is besides a canny novelistic strategy to support this autobiographical caller from being flooded with autobiography. Harriet Clark, calved successful 1980, is the girl of the Weather Underground activistic Judy Clark, who took portion successful the robbery of a Brink’s motortruck successful Nanuet, New York, successful 1981, an incidental that near 3 radical dead. Judy was recovered blameworthy of execution successful 1983, and served thirty-eight years, mostly successful Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Harriet was thirty-eight erstwhile her parent was released, successful 2019. In the book’s acknowledgments, she says that she has been moving connected this caller for “a very, precise agelong time.” One tin hardly ideate the intolerable value of this household inheritance—its singularity astatine erstwhile tempting and hard for a novel, irresistible for truthful galore years yet the lone happening 1 wants to escape, with the novelist girl ever mentally astatine work, similar Penelope astatine her shroud, connected a task that she is simultaneously unwriting. From the novelist’s constituent of view, the story’s fatal glamour skews it toward memoir: Why fictionalize specified singular facts? Clark’s omniscient remedy is to portion her fabrication of astir of those facts, reducing the section references truthful that the communicative shifts distant from singular autobiography toward singular emblem. Not Harriet Clark but an isolated miss successful the city; not Bedford Hills but a hilltop compound named lone Hillcrest; not the notorious Brink’s robbery but a heist that went “too far.”