The Hill

If you know that Harriet Clark is the daughter of Judy Clark, a former Weather Underground founder given a life sentence for her role in a murderous armored-car robbery, you might expect that her first novel, about a girl growing up visiting her mother in prison, would have the realist grit, and perhaps concern the revolutionary fervor, of her life story. But instead she has made almost a fable of her upbringing in The Hill, abstracting that childhood into a melancholy story of loneliness and slow, uncertain self-discovery, leavened by the quietly chaotic comedy of the family she was left with on the outside: her acerbic, once-radical grandmother and her sharp-tongued elderly friends. It’s a strange, heady book. I want to read it again.