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

She was blond and he was dark-haired; they were almost photonegatives. She looked as if she’d been in Bergman films. He was, visually, America’s Camus — wary, heavy-lidded, wreathed in cigarillo smoke, an intellectual turned out in black Levi’s and sheepskin-lined leather jackets.

Hustvedt and Auster’s double-barreled impact could prompt strange reactions. Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul’s lifted a glass and said, “To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Hustvedt wasn’t surprised when he slowly faded from their lives.

Auster was diagnosed with cancer in January 2023, when he was 75. Hustvedt tells the story of his illness — the chaotic E.R. visits, the hair loss, the shrinking and then metastasizing of his tumor, the wracking immunotherapy, the wheelchairs, the inability to write and the gradual loss of language — largely by reprinting the matter-of-fact group emails she sent to close friends to keep them apprised of his progress.

These sorts of missives, as anyone who has written or received them knows, are an art form of their own. When delivering good news, Hustvedt urged caution. “There is an important difference between optimism and hope,” she wrote in one such email. “The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that, at least for those who love the patient, are unsustainable. Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”

Auster was stoic about his illness, but restless and held captive in the borderless region he termed “Cancerland.” No longer able to write fiction, near his death he began to compose a series of letters to his grandson. These letters, which are largely about family history, are printed here and are models of that form: warm, direct, undogmatic.