Superb ... Clark’s novel is a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman ... 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.
Charged with a hushed quality of distillation, lustrous with the obscure meaning of familial romance, plus the sense — common to dreams — of promising some final understanding that can be carried into waking life ... Childhood, much like dreams, is difficult to write about without succumbing to vagueness and sentimentality; there’s also the unfortunate way it means so much more to the person who experienced it than to anyone else. There are none of those pitfalls here. Clark renders Suzanna’s state of unknowing exquisitely ... Clark’s gifts for both the comic and the visionary reach their peak in a virtuoso, semi-hallucinatory passage toward the end of the novel.
A story whose very premise ensures that little can happen poses a narrative challenge. Ms. Clark stages smart, probing explorations of an upbringing marked by waiting and repetition, in which the notion of growth appears fictitious ... There are points when the novel seems, like its characters, to be merely doing time. But not always. Ms. Clark imbues Hillcrest with eerie metaphoric resonance, making it both forbidding and tenderly familiar ... A plot twist near the end rewards much of the reader’s patience; after so much standstill, the sudden change strikes Suzanna—and us—like a blow to the chest.
A remarkable debut novel ... With The Hill, Clark has transformed her unusual childhood into a beautiful, unrepeatable bildungsroman ... A wise, artful, and humane new novelist.
[An] extraordinary debut novel ... The Hill has a sculpted purity to 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.
An utterly unique approach to prison-centric fiction ... There’s a dispassionate detachment to The Hill that is as unnerving as it is authentic ... Arch and darkly humorous, her deadpan wit making her consistently amusing despite the substance of what she’s saying. Clark’s prose frequently feels ever so slightly off balance, sometimes stopping you in your tracks.
t’s a testament to Harriet Clark’s skill that the true subject of this novel—the long, damaging legacy of three generations of mother-daughter estrangement—slowly reveals itself ... One of the funniest books I have read in a while, with deadpan one-liners, bitterly comic in the way only someone aware of the stakes can make a joke ... Meditative.
Most stories about the revolutionary left focus on youth ... The Hill is not that kind of book. The Hill takes place after the arrest, after the trial, after the crash ... It’s something else entirely: a novel about simple devotion ... Clark, a careful stylist, keeps her passive protagonist trapped with tautologies that preclude curiosity ... Her writing can feel evasive to the point of being precious ... We feel the system’s cruelty and inanity and how hard families have to work to keep their connection present tense ... The Hill does not have a happily ever after like One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about the aftermath of radicalism wobbles in its final scene, in which a child of a revolutionary finds her own, less threatening politics, happily and nonviolently skipping off to a protest. Nor is The Hill a polemic. It’s a book about what it’s like to be small with no one to tell you how to grow up.
Reads as though it has intermittent weather, clear and obscured, literal and mysterious. A movingly written and enjoyably unexpected debut about sifting fate from a set of curious and challenging circumstances.
A clear-eyed portrait of punishment and grudges, the costs of political fervor and the difficulty of reconciliation ... An uncommonly empathetic debut novel.
Quietly devastating ... Elegant and unsettling ... In spare, luminous prose, Clark delivers a masterful study of internalized confinement and the quiet, fierce love that can persist within it. An intelligent coming-of-age novel that earns its unease.
