Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is the best American debut novel of the past fifty years, maybe the best American novel of the past fifty years, period. It’s a bold move, then, for Harriet Clark to put her own debut, The Hill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28, 273 pp.), in such explicit conversation with Robinson’s masterpiece. Clark borrows character names, Helen and Sylvie, from Housekeeping, and she channels the cadences of Robinson’s prose: “Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my grandmother, and Helen, my mother,” Robinson’s narrator Ruthie declares; “Say the arrangement of my family was neither destined to be nor destined to last,” Clark’s narrator Suzanna posits. There are shared images (trains sunken to the bottom of a lake), shared visionary moments (in both novels, such moments are occasioned by conflagrations), even a shared dry sense of humor. (Here’s another delightfully Robinsonian sentence from The Hill: “This style of driving, if it was a style of driving, may have been the result of my grandmother’s personality, which was stubborn, or her eyesight, which was poor, or it may have been the result of her driving teacher, who was also my piano teacher and also a drunk.”) In both novels, young girls are left behind not just by parents but by grandparents, loss forming the self into the lovely, lonesome thing it is. Ruthie feels “the life of perished things,” while for Suzanna “departure [is] a fact of life.” On page after page, The Hill echoes not just the general feel of, but specific passages from, Housekeeping.

Remarkably, The Hill stands up to the comparison. Clark’s writing is strong at every level. She’s superb with physical detail, as when she describes an elderly woman’s knuckles as “the little skulls of her joints.” She excels at quick character portraiture, as in this sketch of another elderly woman: “Lillian Abrams couldn’t keep up with conversation but showed up and made sounds of surprise at regular intervals as if she had just woken up.” She’s very good on the delicate interplay of the consciousnesses of people who love and remain opaque to one another: “What lessons he had, he kept to himself. What he knew, he tried in my company not to know.” And she’s just as good on the visionary nature of memory: 

We watched it together, I know that we did, but when I remember that moment it seems I was alone on the terrace and that it was my grandmother in entirety who shot forth then and looked back at me, one eye, one patch, aflame, afloat, set out to sea. That’s how it looks in my memory, as if the chair were a boat and the flaming hair a sail tangled in the wind, bearing my grandmother away.

Clark worked on her novel for more than twenty years and it shows. Every sentence is honed, every scene somehow both inevitable and surprising. The Hill is a consummate work of art.

The novel’s premise is, from a certain angle, quite simple. When the book opens, the narrator, Suzanna Klein, is eight years old and living with her grandparents in New York City. She doesn’t know who her father is. Her mother, Helen, is a political radical who drove the getaway car in a bank robbery. The crime, which occurred when Suzanna was a baby, went horribly wrong—a security guard was killed—and Helen was sentenced to life in prison upstate at a place called Hillcrest. (Clark’s own mother was a member of the Weather Underground and took part in a similar robbery, for which she served thirty-seven years in prison before being granted parole in 2019.) “At the prison considerable fanfare surrounded departures,” Suzanna notes. “But to not depart, it struck me then, was as great a feat as any. To stay by choice, not by curse. To return each week and rise again, to do this forever and ever.” And so Suzanna vows to climb the hill and visit her mother every weekend. Time is one of the many things that prison estranges, and Suzanna’s visits are a way to mark and manage the years through which she and her mother must live. “Around us women counted down to release,” she says, “but my mother and I had been released from countdowns. No reason to look forward, no interest in looking back, we were, as I saw it, free of the past and free of the future.” Repetition becomes something like ritual: a way to both inhabit time and get outside of it.

Suzanna’s prickly grandmother, Sylvie, refuses to see Helen, having sworn “a vow of absence so great she refused to use roads that veered anywhere close to the hill.” (Sylvie is the most sharply drawn character in a novel filled with memorable ones.) The child initially goes up to Hillcrest with her grandfather, Joe—a kindly, patient, and quiet man who, Suzanna tells us, “moved through our days as if something considerable was at stake, but in very small things—getting my eggs right in the morning, finding a parking spot in the shade. If parking for an errand took thirty, forty minutes, what did we care? We were rich in time.” Again and again, the novel examines what it means to be rich or poor in time, to feel time press upon you or stretch out infinitely in front of you. Not even twenty pages into the novel, Joe dies. Suzanna begins visiting Hillcrest with Sr. Claudine—a nun whose “devotion to reunion appeared to extend even to her style of driving, her preference being to drive at the speed of the car in the lane beside us, as if the people in the other car were our traveling companions and we should do our best to keep pace.” 

Eventually, Suzanna takes the train to Hillcrest on her own. Years pass. Things happen. Helen gets involved in the prison’s Puppy Program: as Suzanna writes, “In movie theaters people’s faces open up; I have seen this. Faces like bowls waiting to be filled. My mother’s face went this way each time a puppy came toward us. Fill me up, fill me up, my mother’s face said.” Then Helen is moved to a different unit in the prison and the dogs are left behind. She writes a letter to Sylvie; Sylvie refuses to read it. Suzanna goes to high school, does an internship at the Museum of Natural History, and suffers loss after loss. But the novel’s plot is really something like an anti-plot: Helen stays and stays; Suzanna returns and returns. 

Like many acts of devotion, Suzanna’s visits aren’t always pleasant. Helen talks of her past—visits to Coney Island, learning to drive on a trip to Baltimore—and Suzanna pretends to fall asleep; Helen reaches out and Suzanna pulls back. As the child observes, “My mother wanted me to get to know her and this clashed with the desire I had to not get to know her.” “Do you go out of your way to know nothing?” Suzanna’s grandmother asks, to which Suzanna thinks, “the answer must be yes. Ignorance, innocence, a preference for not going in.” This “preference for not going in” is partly an emotional and cognitive strategy: Suzanna protects herself by maintaining distance from the world, from other people, from her own self and her desires. It’s also partly an act of charity. There’s something sacred about the private and interior self, a lesson learned early by a girl who has gotten to know her mother under the constant gaze of prison guards: “Everything I had ever done or said to my mother took place within ear- or eyeshot of other people. My notions of privacy had grown elaborate.”

This “preference for not going in” is, finally and most interestingly, a formal strategy of the novel itself. We don’t learn much about Helen’s political commitments—or, really, about Helen, who remains a shadowy presence throughout the book. Before Sylvie dies, she has Suzanna burn all her papers and photographs: “Burn everything and have no children and be a good girl,” she commands. Early in the novel, Suzanna describes being driven home from Hillcrest: “The things my grandfather said on the ride home required no response; he let me leave that place at my own pace.” Joe’s courtesy towards his young granddaughter is a form of love; he accompanies her in her loss but doesn’t force her to give voice to it. This accompaniment echoes Sr. Claudine’s tendency to drive alongside cars in the lane beside her. (It also echoes a scene from Housekeeping where Ruthie and her sister walk beside a slow-moving train, looking at a single woman through the window.) Being alone together, sitting with but not barging in on the inner lives of others: this is the novel’s model for communion.

In her essay “Psalm Eight,” Marilynne Robinson describes growing up in the sublime wildness of Idaho: “In my childhood, when the presence of God seemed everywhere and I seemed to myself a mote of exception, improbable as a flaw in the sun, the very sweetness of the experience lay in that stinging thought—not me, not like me, not mine.” In The Hill, Suzanna makes a similar observation, not about feeling the otherness of the natural world but the otherness of people:

A phenomenon familiar to me from my grandparents and their friends, the sense that not only had their real lives occurred before I arrived but their real faces were also something I had come along too late in life to see. Some nights I took this personally, the way their faces said—skin obscuring bones, bones obscuring skin—not for you, not for you.

In childhood, we know that we are singular, other, alone—a knowledge that stings but also sweetens existence. Lonesomeness can be beautiful, our difference from all that surrounds us something to be cherished. Robinson’s vision is fundamentally theological: humans are created in the image of God; this fact confers upon them an absolute dignity and mystery. Clark’s vision is less John Calvin than Henry James: the self for her is that which remains ultimately unknowable, that which can’t be fully plumbed. For both writers, fiction offers access to the interior life even while reminding us that the interior life, of others and of ourselves, remains a mystery. Not me, not like me, not mine.  

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