Culture
Book Review: ‘The Hill,’ by Harriet Clark
Part of Clark’s subtlety is the way in which the category of “what Suzanna refuses to know” remains undefined. Is it, as her grandmother would have it, full comprehension of her mother’s crime? Is it the realm of cold hard facts in general? Or is it nothing less than her own personhood, what with Suzanna’s self-curtailing commitment to remaining within visiting distance of the hill? Whatever the case, Suzanna’s mode of consciousness seems to grant her less quantifiable, more precious forms of knowledge. Even into her teenage years there’s a visionary quality to the way she experiences the world — as if she were a tiny, strange saint of a religion of her own devising.
All this numinousness isn’t to say that Clark can’t also be very droll. Consider, for example, the flock of captious old Commie dowagers who surround the grandmother and on whom Suzanna waits, obediently dispensing gin. These ostensible friends like to ask one another things like, “Remember, Sylvie, when you were a Nazi?”
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. Facing death, the grandmother enlists Suzanna’s help in burning her personal effects. Even her wig is destined for the pyre — a wastebasket on the terrace. As Suzanna dutifully tosses it into the flames, an unholy vision presents itself: “The wig rose right out of the basket of its own accord, never seeming more like human hair than it did in that instant, hovering before us, burning, presenting itself, then sweeping over the railing, caught on its own fierce wind.”
Soon, with the wig transfigured into a kind of premature ghost of its owner, “my grandmother is looking at me and she is telling me everything: about her mother, her mother’s hair. …” The pages that follow, conjuring the affective lives of generations of women, are both dreamlike and the most exhilaratingly all-seeing of the book. In this sense, Suzanna is wide awake.
THE HILL | By Harriet Clark | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 276 pp. | $27
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment highlights observations from future or alternate worlds depicted in popular science fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
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