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

Now a third joins their company, Harriet Clark’s superb first novel, “The Hill” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). 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. Clark’s novel is a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman. 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). People dispense advice to our heroine of the kind that one encounters in stories properly poised on the cusp of life. Suzanna’s grandmother tells her, “We’ll have to see how you turn out.” Suzanna’s mother intones, “All kids leave their mother . . . children leave. They’re supposed to.” She writes imploringly from prison, “If you figure out a way to be happy . . . it changes everything.”

But where would Suzanna go? And how could she leave her mother, if her mother left her first? Besides, like the young sisters in “Housekeeping,” Suzanna is only faintly socialized. Her father is not in the picture; she seems to have no school friends; she is at the mercy of her eccentric and willful grandparents. Clark’s novel is something of a tribute to Robinson’s. She gives Suzanna’s mother and grandmother the same names that Robinson gives her book’s mother and aunt (Helen and Sylvie), and she likes to start sentences with Robinson’s grandly suppositional “Say” (in the style I channelled earlier: “Say that a human life is a metaphysical experiment”). More important, Robinson seems to have shown Clark how to write about a girl whose mother is absent (in “Housekeeping,” the mother kills herself) but whose fate rests with elders so absorbed in their own intricate dramas of departure that their young charge feels abandoned twice over, by two generations of absconding guardians.

Like Robinson, Clark gets some comedy out of the morbid whimsy (so it seems to Suzanna) of the very old. For one thing, the old have an inconvenient habit of dying. It’s foolish, Suzanna laments, “to have attached myself to the group of people least likely to stick around.” First to go is Suzanna’s grandfather, who had accompanied her for years on her weekly prison visits. (Her grandmother has taken “a vow of absence” and never goes to see her daughter.) Suzanna views the world with a sort of jealous estrangement, refusing to make sense of fundamentals such as death. She has divided others into “those who leave and those who stay,” and her grandfather’s departure simply puts him in the wrong camp. Here, Clark’s novel offers a beautifully subtle picture of childish unsubtlety: “One day it was unbelievable that a person would die, and another day we believed it. A change in him or in us.”

“Just say they’re the greatest pancakes. You don’t need to add ‘of these United States.’ ”

Cartoon by Lars Kenseth

Even when not dying, the older generation has a marked talent for disappearance. Sylvie, Suzanna’s grandmother, is at the heart of the book: stubborn, abrupt, vengeful, wounded, and wounding. Also, wildly amusing. Her erratic driving, for instance, stems from her conviction that the lines on the road are mere suggestions, “and when had she given heed to other people’s suggestions?” Furious at her imprisoned daughter, Sylvie punishes her near-at-hand granddaughter with another type of imprisonment: a vision of the world as an implacably hostile zero-sum game, in which everyone is killing one another. Your mother’s choices “killed your grandfather,” Sylvie tells Suzanna. And now “you’re killing me.” Sylvie is haunted by what she sees as her daughter’s selfish desertion of Suzanna as a baby: when she chose to rob the bank, she tells her granddaughter, “she held you and looked at you and then she put you down and left you forever.” Now Sylvie metes out the same punishment on Suzanna: “Punishment comes in many forms, and my grandmother’s preferred form was banishment. My removal or hers, expulsion or disappearance.” 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.

With the exception of the punitive visit to the bank, Suzanna’s grandmother does not discuss her daughter’s crime or her reasons for committing it. “What your mother did” is Sylvie’s smothering précis; “your mother took it too far” is her grandfather’s milder version. This may well echo the kind of rationed discourse that the author heard when she was growing up with her own grandparents. But it is also a canny novelistic strategy to keep this autobiographical novel from being flooded with autobiography. 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. In the book’s acknowledgments, she says that she has been working on this novel for “a very, very long time.” One can barely imagine the intolerable weight of this family inheritance—its singularity at once tempting and difficult for a novel, irresistible for so many years yet the only thing one wants to escape, with the novelist daughter always mentally at work, like Penelope at her shroud, on a project that she is simultaneously unwriting. From the novelist’s point of view, the story’s fatal glamour skews it toward memoir: Why fictionalize such remarkable facts? 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.”