Harriet Clark’s Début Is a New Kind of Coming-of-Age Novel
The bildungsroman is the coming-of-age novel; it is also the coming-to-terms novel. The protagonist, usually a young man, undergoes a series of adventures that eventually spit him out wiser, stronger, set up for life’s journey. The form schools the hero in the ways of the world, and, even if he is rebellious (“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”) or cynical (“Sentimental Education”), the ways of the world are taken as given. Or even embraced: perhaps the genre’s best-loved example, “David Copperfield,” ends with marriage.
It is curious that the bildungsroman, officially committed to interrogating the world, should be so at home in it. Then again, the novel, a worldly form and rather proud of it, has good reason not to question the basic terms of our existence. We shouldn’t be surprised that, with a few notable exceptions, the novel avoids any fundamental metaphysical skepticism: it may be a largely secular genre, but its secularism is settled, not unduly tormented. Traditionally, the bourgeois novel questioned the viability of bourgeois life, not the viability of life itself.
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But imagine, for a moment, a different kind of coming-of-age novel. Say that a human life is a metaphysical experiment—though one that, by and large, refuses to think of itself as such. Metaphysical because we are trying to ascertain the meaning of our existence, the significance of our short lease. An experiment because we can, if we want, test the likelihood of that significance against the likelihood of futility. And a refusal because we might come to the alarming conclusion that life, metaphysically speaking, is not ordained or designed but arbitrary—that it is, in fact, ordained to be arbitrary. Just as the worldly novel tends to do, most of us dodge and deny this fundamental experiment, since the revelation would seem to rob life of the jewel of meaning. Or worse, to turn it into a sort of prison sentence.
Are there examples of this kind of bildungsroman? A coming-of-age novel alert to the terror of the arbitrary, restless with the very terms of our earthly existence? In our era, two come to mind: Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” (1980) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (2005). Robinson is warmly theological where Ishiguro is bleakly philosophical, lyrically expansive where Ishiguro is almost blandly lucid. But what these books have in common—apart from the telling fact that both are narrated by female characters—is a powerful estrangement from the structures of ordinary life. In both novels, young people are trying to figure out how life works, confounded by the arbitrariness of what is presented to them as natural. The arrivals and departures that, for most of us, constitute the largely comprehensible stages of existence (birth, school, love, marriage, death) function, in these novels, like whimsically slammed doors. Though embedded in society, these young characters are Kaspar Hauser-like figures, spectrally isolated from the signifying world, forced to construct meaning for themselves, from the ground up. For Robinson, that task amounts to the construction of a personal religion, part pantheistic, part Christian. For Ishiguro, the quest results in a revelation of the darkest possible allegory. Both are profoundly unworldly novels: they show us that it is not inevitable that we can (Robinson), or should (Ishiguro), make our way through the world at all.
Now a third joins their company, Harriet Clark’s superb first novel, “The Hill” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It is narrated by Suzanna, who lives with her grandparents in New York City. Nearly every weekend—first with her grandfather, then with a nun named Sister Claudine, and, finally, once she’s nearly a teen-ager, on her own—Suzanna makes a trip out of town to visit her mother in a hilltop prison. Only gradually does it emerge that her mother is serving a very long sentence for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the death of a security guard. Clark’s novel is a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman. It has the form and emphasis of a coming-of-age story but is devoid of the usual content. We see Suzanna through her developing phases—at nine, at twelve, at fifteen, and then about to graduate from high school, a period when “a great venturing forth had commenced” (though not for Suzanna, who does not apply to college). People dispense advice to our heroine of the kind that one encounters in stories properly poised on the cusp of life. Suzanna’s grandmother tells her, “We’ll have to see how you turn out.” Suzanna’s mother intones, “All kids leave their mother . . . children leave. They’re supposed to.” She writes imploringly from prison, “If you figure out a way to be happy . . . it changes everything.”
But where would Suzanna go? And how could she leave her mother, if her mother left her first? Besides, like the young sisters in “Housekeeping,” Suzanna is only faintly socialized. Her father is not in the picture; she seems to have no school friends; she is at the mercy of her eccentric and willful grandparents. Clark’s novel is something of a tribute to Robinson’s. She gives Suzanna’s mother and grandmother the same names that Robinson gives her book’s mother and aunt (Helen and Sylvie), and she likes to start sentences with Robinson’s grandly suppositional “Say” (in the style I channelled earlier: “Say that a human life is a metaphysical experiment”). More important, Robinson seems to have shown Clark how to write about a girl whose mother is absent (in “Housekeeping,” the mother kills herself) but whose fate rests with elders so absorbed in their own intricate dramas of departure that their young charge feels abandoned twice over, by two generations of absconding guardians.
Like Robinson, Clark gets some comedy out of the morbid whimsy (so it seems to Suzanna) of the very old. For one thing, the old have an inconvenient habit of dying. It’s foolish, Suzanna laments, “to have attached myself to the group of people least likely to stick around.” First to go is Suzanna’s grandfather, who had accompanied her for years on her weekly prison visits. (Her grandmother has taken “a vow of absence” and never goes to see her daughter.) Suzanna views the world with a sort of jealous estrangement, refusing to make sense of fundamentals such as death. She has divided others into “those who leave and those who stay,” and her grandfather’s departure simply puts him in the wrong camp. Here, Clark’s novel offers a beautifully subtle picture of childish unsubtlety: “One day it was unbelievable that a person would die, and another day we believed it. A change in him or in us.”
Even when not dying, the older generation has a marked talent for disappearance. Sylvie, Suzanna’s grandmother, is at the heart of the book: stubborn, abrupt, vengeful, wounded, and wounding. Also, wildly amusing. Her erratic driving, for instance, stems from her conviction that the lines on the road are mere suggestions, “and when had she given heed to other people’s suggestions?” Furious at her imprisoned daughter, Sylvie punishes her near-at-hand granddaughter with another type of imprisonment: a vision of the world as an implacably hostile zero-sum game, in which everyone is killing one another. Your mother’s choices “killed your grandfather,” Sylvie tells Suzanna. And now “you’re killing me.” Sylvie is haunted by what she sees as her daughter’s selfish desertion of Suzanna as a baby: when she chose to rob the bank, she tells her granddaughter, “she held you and looked at you and then she put you down and left you forever.” Now Sylvie metes out the same punishment on Suzanna: “Punishment comes in many forms, and my grandmother’s preferred form was banishment. My removal or hers, expulsion or disappearance.” One day, Sylvie takes Suzanna, age nine, to the bank that her mother robbed, forces her to go inside on her own, and then inexplicably drives away. Suzanna understands this particular lesson to be that “the arrangement of my family was neither destined to be nor destined to last.” Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t have to visit your mother, she says. But I do have to, Suzanna replies. “According to who?” Sylvie asks. “You don’t even have to go to school.” Fed on moral scraps, the child must find her own meaning on which to subsist.
With the exception of the punitive visit to the bank, Suzanna’s grandmother does not discuss her daughter’s crime or her reasons for committing it. “What your mother did” is Sylvie’s smothering précis; “your mother took it too far” is her grandfather’s milder version. This may well echo the kind of rationed discourse that the author heard when she was growing up with her own grandparents. But it is also a canny novelistic strategy to keep this autobiographical novel from being flooded with autobiography. Harriet Clark, born in 1980, is the daughter of the Weather Underground activist Judy Clark, who took part in the robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nanuet, New York, in 1981, an incident that left three people dead. Judy was found guilty of murder in 1983, and served thirty-eight years, mostly in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Harriet was thirty-eight when her mother was released, in 2019. In the book’s acknowledgments, she says that she has been working on this novel for “a very, very long time.” One can barely imagine the intolerable weight of this family inheritance—its singularity at once tempting and difficult for a novel, irresistible for so many years yet the only thing one wants to escape, with the novelist daughter always mentally at work, like Penelope at her shroud, on a project that she is simultaneously unwriting. 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. Not Harriet Clark but an isolated girl in the city; not Bedford Hills but a hilltop compound named only Hillcrest; not the notorious Brink’s robbery but a heist that went “too far.”
One effect is that the bildungsroman, which would typically chart the stages of a richly realized domestic existence, is forced to turn its stripped story into a kind of bitter allegory, in which those stages of development and fulfillment are ironized by an institution that deprives them of meaning: the prison. Clark wields prison nomenclature like something out of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”: we become intimately familiar with the compound’s various spaces—Visiting, Children’s Center, Laundry, Processing, the Hole, the Roost. Sister Claudine, the kindly nun who takes Suzanna to visit her mother after her grandfather’s death, is referred to as Sister. When Sister retires from prison work, she ends her days at the ominously named Saint Joseph’s Home for Compassionate Returns, praying at the bedsides of the dying. These are the true spaces and phrases of Suzanna’s development, the valley she must journey through. If what she wants most is to be united with her mother in prison, if it is in Visiting or the Children’s Center that she feels most alive, then her life is something like an inherited prison sentence, weekly revoked and reinstated. The prison, which took away her mother and which makes Suzanna’s life conditional, functions like the clones’ boarding school in “Never Let Me Go,” generating and voiding meaning at once. Suzanna’s mother may say that the most important thing is to find a way to be happy, but an acquaintance of Sylvie’s seems closer to the mark when he briskly consoles Suzanna: “Don’t worry . . . you’ll get to die too. No one has to live forever.”
The other effect of Clark’s reductions is that she need not revisit and adjudicate the ethics of Judy Clark’s radicalism. The book focusses not on the past but on the strange, lonely present, which is full of waiting. Suzanna’s grandparents have steered her away from all forms of political engagement: “Though previously in the family attempts had been made to act on the world, great efforts to change it, what had been communicated to me was that the world was none of my business.” This may explain why Suzanna’s mother is a somewhat indistinct presence in the novel (at least compared with fierce Sylvie)—patient, even serene behind bars, more eager to talk about her daughter’s future than about her own future, let alone her troubled past. By widening the lens, Clark is able to redirect the book’s gaze from the mother toward a quizzical, sometimes critical, but not unaffectionate portrait of two generations of political activism, with the attendant self-involvement and domestic negligence. Suzanna’s grandparents may powerfully disapprove of their daughter’s choices, but as good Communists they did their time in the Soviet Union, where Suzanna’s grandfather worked in the Moscow office of the Daily Worker. Perhaps Sylvie now regrets her time in Moscow, even the tenor of her politics. But Suzanna can’t help noticing, as she listens to her grandmother talk with her friends, that an entire generation seems to have done a notably poor job of “keeping their children around.” Parental abandonment is passed down, learned. Suzanna’s mother abandoned her the moment she decided to rob the bank. And Sylvie, who still gazes with utmost tenderness at a black-and-white photograph, taken during her time abroad, of a nameless wailing Russian child, has permanently abandoned her own daughter by refusing to visit her.
Is it any wonder that Suzanna longs only for connection and reunion? Her fond idea of restoration, of healing, of heaven—a secular version of the poetic dreams of eternity that punctuate “Housekeeping”—is:
It is a measure of this novel’s lucidity, its honesty and unillusioned wit, that Suzanna’s vision of this crowded heaven, shared with her grandmother, is not allowed to rest on its lyrical laurels. “Like hell,” Sylvie comments. Or, at least, like prison. ♦