Pick of the Issue this week is James Wood’s absorbing “Visiting Hours” – a review of Harriet Clark’s novel The Hill. Wood calls it “superb” – “a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman.” What’s it about? Why is it “deprived”? Wood tells us:

It is narrated by Suzanna, who lives with her grandparents in New York City. Nearly every weekend—first with her grandfather, then with a nun named Sister Claudine, and, finally, once she’s nearly a teen-ager, on her own—Suzanna makes a trip out of town to visit her mother in a hilltop prison. Only gradually does it emerge that her mother is serving a very long sentence for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the death of a security guard. It has the form and emphasis of a coming-of-age story but is devoid of the usual content. We see Suzanna through her developing phases—at nine, at twelve, at fifteen, and then about to graduate from high school, a period when “a great venturing forth had commenced” (though not for Suzanna, who does not apply to college). 

About halfway through his review, Wood springs a surprise: The Hill is based on Clark’s real life. Wood writes, 

Harriet Clark, born in 1980, is the daughter of the Weather Underground activist Judy Clark, who took part in the robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nanuet, New York, in 1981, an incident that left three people dead. Judy was found guilty of murder in 1983, and served thirty-eight years, mostly in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Harriet was thirty-eight when her mother was released, in 2019.

And then he asks an excellent question: “Why fictionalize such remarkable facts?” His answer is interesting:

Clark’s wise remedy is to strip her fiction of most of those facts, reducing the local references so that the narrative shifts away from singular autobiography toward singular emblem. Not Harriet Clark but an isolated girl in the city; not Bedford Hills but a hilltop compound named only Hillcrest; not the notorious Brink’s robbery but a heist that went “too far.”

The effect of Clark’s reductions, Wood says, is twofold: (1) it “turns its stripped story into a kind of bitter allegory, in which those stages of development and fulfillment are ironized by an institution that deprives them of meaning: the prison”; and (2), it spares Clark from having to “revisit and adjudicate the ethics of her mother’s radicalism.” 

I like Wood’s question. But I’m not persuaded by his answers. Clark chose to transform her life story into allegory. That’s her right. And it appears she’s written a brilliant one. But, as for me, I prefer the facts. 

Wood’s review contains an inspired sentence – the last line of a passage in which he discusses Suzanna’s grandmother Sylvie, who, he says, is “at the heart of the book.” Here’s the passage:

One day, Sylvie takes Suzanna, age nine, to the bank that her mother robbed, forces her to go inside on her own, and then inexplicably drives away. Suzanna understands this particular lesson to be that “the arrangement of my family was neither destined to be nor destined to last.” Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t have to visit your mother, she says. But I do have to, Suzanna replies. “According to who?” Sylvie asks. “You don’t even have to go to school.” Fed on moral scraps, the child must find her own meaning on which to subsist.

I love that last sentence. It makes me want to read the book, to see if Suzanna is able to do it.