Early in The Hill, Harriet Clark’s extraordinary debut novel, the narrator, nine-year-old Suzanna, is let out of the car at an unfamiliar bank branch by Sylvie, her grandmother. “Read the plaque,” Sylvie orders, before driving off without her. Suzanna waits for hours in the bank’s vestibule—that practical but indeterminate space shielding the true interior from the intemperate outdoors—much to the bewilderment of the young security guard perched on a stool nearby. Eventually the bank closes, its tellers depart, and the guard crouches down to say, “You have to tell me who to call.” Just then, Sylvie drives up to retrieve her charge, who hasn’t set foot inside the bank itself but reports to her grandmother that it contains no plaque.
The bank is where Suzanna’s mother, Helen, committed the crime that resulted in her life sentence. Sylvie wants Suzanna to know more about this, but Suzanna herself will not budge from that vestibule. She was an infant when Helen left to drive the getaway car for a team of bank robbers and never came back. She has no memory of her mother outside of their weekly visits at Hillcrest prison, and her incuriosity about what led to this situation is something Clark seems to share. “Do you go out of your way to know nothing?” Sylvie often asks, and as far as Suzanna is concerned, “the answer must be yes. Ignorance, innocence, a preference for not going in. Already it seemed to me that the best way to solve problems was to live as if it wasn’t a problem.”
Throughout Suzanna’s first eight years, her grandfather Joe drives her from their city apartment to the hilltop prison where his daughter lives, never speaking to Helen himself. The implacable Sylvie refuses to visit or to communicate in any way with their daughter. Then Joe dies, and there’s no one to drive Suzanna to Hillcrest. For the girl, this development presents a crisis, because she has made a vow, one “that seemed the greatest vow I knew”—to go on visiting her mother, every week, for the rest of her life.
Despite a few passing details about The Hill’s settings in Manhattan, where Suzanna lives with her grandparents, and the prison, located somewhere outside the city, its opening pages have the dreamy, elemental feel of a fairy tale, a reflection of Suzanna’s age at the beginning of the book. The prison itself comes wrapped in mythic import. (The novel’s epigraph, from Camus, is “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”) The first time Suzanna insists on climbing up the road to its gates on her own, leaving her grandfather waiting in the parking lot, her ascent takes on a ceremonial aspect; she then proceeds down the visiting room’s aisle “like a bride.”
Suzanna, like most children, craves consistency and security from the adults around her, especially after her gentle grandfather’s death. Her remaining caregiver, however, is a reluctant one, with a fierce disposition. The first Hanukkah after Joe’s death, on each of the holiday’s successive nights, Suzanna’s grandmother gives her a figurine from a different culture, all warriors. “You’re nine now,” Sylvie announces. “You should understand this is a holiday about war.” Without Joe to buy shampoo, Suzanna’s hair goes unwashed and uncut. And needless to say, Sylvie doesn’t see why her granddaughter needs to visit Hillcrest. When Suzanna insists, “That’s my mother. I have to see her,” her grandmother replies, “According to who? You don’t even have to go to school.” Sylvie blames Helen for leaving her burdened with rearing a child just at a point in her life when she wanted to run free, and—somewhat obscurely—she also holds her daughter responsible for her husband’s death.
As for the crime itself, it has autobiographical features. Clark’s mother, Judy Clark, was imprisoned for second-degree murder for serving as the getaway driver in the infamous 1981 assault on a Brink’s truck by members of the Black Liberation Army and former members of the Weather Underground, which resulted in the death of a guard and two police officers. Harriet, like Suzanna, was an infant at the time of the robbery. Her mother’s motives, like Helen’s, were ideological. Suzanna overhears a couple of women in a dentist’s office discussing the crime, and one corrects the other, explaining that Suzanna’s mother didn’t rob a bank—she “expropriated funds for the purpose of revolutionary struggle.” Suzanna can’t tell if the woman means to defend her mother, mock her, or both.
The revolutionary leftists of the 1970s, and particularly the experiences of their children, continue to fascinate, providing the backstory for Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent film One Battle After Another* and the subject of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, a new memoir by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of two leading members of the Weather Underground. Like Dohrn, who spent his childhood learning to evade government agents and to talk in code on pay phones, the children of these radicals sometimes doubt their own importance in their parents’ lives. This is less of a problem for Suzanna, whose mother appears to be utterly purged of political zeal. Helen is, in fact, as perfect and as selfless a mother as an incarcerated woman could be, carefully concealing the hardships of prison life from her child and writing letters urging her to “figure out a way to be happy,” because this would change “not just everything to come but everything that came before.” Suzanna’s mother’s crime will be redeemed not by the revolution (which never seems to arrive), but by the happiness of a single girl.
Helen is the fuzziest character in a novel otherwise ripe with memorable, well-etched personalities. Her featureless virtue resembles that of a lady in a chivalric romance, the idealized, rather distant figure to whom the striving knight swears complete and platonic devotion. Whether the lady merits the knight’s fealty—or the mother deserves her daughter’s vow to shape her entire life around their weekly meetings—is not what matters. What matters is the vow itself, and how it infuses Suzanna’s life with purpose and stability. The promise is not to her mother, but to herself.
Suzanna’s beloved antagonist in this commitment is Sylvie, who with her friends—a gaggle of old ladies, all jaded former Communist Party members—provides The Hill with its considerable liveliness and wit. While Helen’s political convictions are barely sketched, Sylvie’s disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the party is fully drawn. It is a storied past, including a period when Sylvie posed as a Nazi to attend Nazi Party events before delivering reports to Communist Party leaders. She and her friends inhabit a world of aged New Yorkers whose humble appearances belie their dashing histories. One of the friends’ neighbors, an old man who dies alone, his body left long enough to collect a coating of plaster dust, turns out to have been a parachuter in the Lincoln Brigade. “Can you imagine?” Sylvie’s friend asks Suzanna. “He jumped toward the Fascists.”
Suzanna observes, “Though previously in the family attempts had been made to act on the world, great efforts to change it, what had been communicated to me was that the world was none of my business.” Her grandmother had once boarded an ocean liner for Europe to join Joe in the Soviet Union, where he had landed a plum job in the Moscow bureau of the Daily Worker. But her experiences in the USSR seem to have divested her of whatever political optimism she once possessed. Now she admires “the titans of the newspaper business, the railroad business, businesses that controlled other businesses. Men who knew how the world worked and weren’t ashamed to take charge.” Sylvie sits around with her cronies, complaining about their husbands and children and imagining alternate lives for themselves. Suzanna serves these gatherings silently, responding to hand signals indicating a preference for vodka or gin, as if she were a squire or cupbearer, another touch of the medieval in this Upper West Side milieu. “I thought better things were ahead,” one of the women laments, contemplating her youthful dreams of living “with horses,” the novel’s recurring image of liberty. “You were wrong,” another replies, and the women all raise their glasses at once, as if in a toast.
As these old wives become widows and Suzanna grows into her teens, Sylvie forms a plan to join one of her friends in a rented house in the Alps. “Like the women at the prison,” Suzanna notes, “my grandmother began counting down to freedom.” “We’ll both be busy,” Sylvie enthuses about her granddaughter’s coming adulthood. “We’ll be out all the time. Your grandfather and I, we thought the future was some big collective thing, but it’s not. The only future you get is your own. Study for your test, get to your life.” When Suzanna asks where she herself will be when her grandmother goes to Europe, she’s told she’ll be off on her own adventures. “So one person’s adventure is another’s expulsion,” the girl decides.
To hasten the advent of these plans, Sylvie arranges for Suzanna to skip seventh grade and doesn’t inform her of the change until the first day of school. This separates Suzanna from her old friends and leaves her feeling even more disconnected. It must be said, though, that those friends are pretty notional. None of them is named, and only one is described, and even then only in the act of renouncing Suzanna. This lacuna, where many teenagers would find intense and formative relationships, further contributes to the fable-like tone of the novel, as if Suzanna were Snow White, holed up in the woods somewhere with the Seven Old Commies. Absent, too, is any whiff of Suzanna’s adolescent sexuality, anything that might threaten to pull her out of the stasis she so craves. In one interlude, she joins a group of schoolmates (many of whom turn out to have taken LSD) sprawled on the Great Lawn in Central Park. She sits down near a boy who is drowsing on the grass and giving off, in a typically lovely phrase, “the heat of sleeping babies.” He, too, instantly perceives their dynamic as filial, and doesn’t object when she pats the ground next to him and coos, “Sleep, baby, sleep.”
After Joe’s death and before she is old enough to take the train upstate on her own, Suzanna is driven to Hillcrest, along with an assortment of other prisoners’ children, by a nun, Sister Claudine. Claudine believes ardently that families belong together, and she urges Suzanna to persuade her grandmother to visit Helen. “That my grandmother would one day go up the hill was indeed as impossible to me as the prospect that my mother would come down it,” Suzanna judges. “But I did not need either of these to occur.”
She’s essentially a nun herself. Clark’s choice to shed the usual concerns of a coming-of-age story—the revelation of bodily change, the primacy of the peer group, the stirrings of romantic and erotic desire, the first inklings of what we want to make of our adult selves—leaves Suzanna with a set of imperatives as simple, adamantine, and reliable as the rituals of Matins, Vespers, and Compline. She will live with her grandmother, entertain her grandmother’s friends, and visit her mother every week. She does not apply to college or show interest in any sort of work because she already has her vocation. She wants as little change as possible.
No wonder, then, that Hillcrest becomes a sanctuary for her, a place where her mother can always be found because she can never leave. Yet even this precious source of steadiness has its fragility. An imperious new volunteer, known only as “the rich woman,” arrives to oversee the prison’s Children’s Center, a room where inmates play games, read books, and make crafts with their offspring. “There was something young children had that this woman liked and something older kids had she disliked,” Suzanna observes, and this new authority figure begins lowering the age cap for visitors to the center from eighteen to sixteen, then to fourteen, until finally eligibility is left up to “official discretion.” The rich woman patrols her domain, quizzing the rowdier kids on how old they are, brandishing the threat of expulsion to the main visitors’ room, where they will be obliged to sit still and be forbidden to touch their mothers. Suzanna and Helen retreat to a snug enclosure called the Reading Roost to remove themselves from the rich woman’s sight line. But as Suzanna grows bigger, the Roost becomes increasingly hot and stinky, and finally she has to concede that she has grown up and out of the Children’s Center.
Clark brings a realism to the prison scenes in The Hill that she spares the world outside. She conveys little sense of what Sylvie’s apartment looks like, but the Children’s Center, with its office like a fishbowl, its craft tables, the corner where inmates and their kids can have their photos taken with a choice of cheery backgrounds, is an apparition summoned from the novel’s pages. In contrast to Suzanna’s woolly perceptions of New York City, her neighborhood, and her classmates, Clark picks out gestures and remarks that illuminate the deprivations and traumas of prison life. “Everything I had ever done or said to my mother took place within ear- and eye-shot of other people,” Suzanna mentions almost casually. She, too, becomes one of the observers, noting that in two small rooms “where children visited mothers who could not be alone with their children,” a young woman escorted the visitors everywhere, even to the bathrooms.
When one of the children, gathered with the rest of us at the exit gate, tried to hug his mother, the young woman kept one hand on the child’s shoulder, and when the mother came down on her knees for a hug, the young woman leaned down too.
And then there are the babies born inside and carried out by nuns, three months after birth. “The thing about babies in prison,” Sister Claudine tells Suzanna, “is that they don’t know they’re in prison, but they know when we force them to leave.”
Even the prison changes occasionally. The introduction of a guide-dog training program brings puppies into Hillcrest, along with a whole new kind of status determined by which women qualify to train a puppy. The animals reorganize the attention of every room they enter, like celebrities, Suzanna thinks: “The dog, not the woman, was the celebrity, but the woman was special too because she got to sleep in a room with the dog’s breathing and touch its body whenever she wanted.” Helen refuses to apply for the program because the training would require giving up a month of visits, but when an accident shuts down the visiting room for four weeks, she finally manages to get a puppy. Suzanna, to her own dismay, is jealous: “The dog frayed to nothing the good manners my mother had managed to demonstrate toward me for so many years by minimizing all evidence of her life spent elsewhere.” She begrudges every scrap of her mother’s attention that the puppy steals from her, and envies the animal for seeing parts of the prison she isn’t allowed to enter. And what child, vows notwithstanding, can ever compete with the loyalty and obedience of a dog?
Eventually Sylvie’s health begins to fail, first with a cataract. Her doctor refuses to operate on it, so Suzanna fashions her an eye patch. “If only there was something politically useful,” Sylvie’s funniest friend quips, “about your current affinity with pirates.” The Alps trip never materializes after the friend planning to rent a house there has a series of strokes. “Now it seems foolish for me to have attached myself to the group of people least likely to stick around,” Suzanna acknowledges. “But those women were, until they weren’t, as lasting as anything.” Sylvie insists that Suzanna burn all her papers and photographs after she dies, and then decides they have to do it before. “I need you there with me,” she tells her granddaughter. “I need you to see what I’ve done.” The only item she wants saved is a photo of a child she did not know, wailing in a street “that could have been anywhere but was Moscow.” The child is starving or his parents are dead or everyone he knows is dead, and he knows that he will soon be dead, too. “We killed him,” Sylvie tells her granddaughter. “Me and your grandfather and everyone else. We should look at this and feel ashamed.”
If Helen feels a similar remorse, it goes unmentioned. Her crime and the conditions that spawned it are magnets for attention. With The Hill, Clark clearly wants to turn that attention elsewhere, to the price paid for incarceration by the innocent family members, particularly children, of the convicted. To dwell on blame is to care about the past, something Suzanna resists as much as she refuses to think about her future. She doesn’t wonder who or where her father is, and she doesn’t resent her mother for getting locked up in the first place. All Suzanna cares about is what she needs right now, a child’s position that she tries to occupy as long as possible. Even her mother joins the chorus of adults urging her to get on with her life, specifically to “leave,” the one thing she has organized her life around avoiding. “I live where I live,” she tells her mother. “It’s where I’ll always live.”
The Hill has a sculpted purity to it, formed by the absence of all the stuff that would fill Suzanna’s life if she chose to actually live it. It has the shape of a child’s love for her mother, a love that has to squeeze through such a narrow aperture that it can never be fully accommodated. Like the nun’s love for God, it can satisfy itself only through renunciation of everything else. In the end, however, Hillcrest is not a convent—and besides, even convents are subject to the vicissitudes of history. Suzanna cannot linger in that vestibule forever. “The world,” her grandmother exclaims when her friend reminds her of where she could travel in her remaining years. “I forgot about the whole fucking world.” The old have that luxury. The world will always come for the young.
English (US) · 