It’s hard not to feel jaded about books this spring. The New York Times just had to put a disclaimer on a book review, admitting that the reviewer used AI to write it, The Washington Post’s books section is no more, and any talk about books and what’s in them has been taken over by people yelling that AI will kill everything good about literature. 

To counteract all this, I’ve decided to read even harder. I’ve been reading more books that have a distinct voice. I like prose that’s “like glass,” as I once heard Zadie Smith describe it, as much as the next person, but sometimes you need sentences that delight you in their rudeness, that catch you up in how awkward they are. I’ve been reading A Coronet Among the Weeds, a 1963 coming-of-age memoir by Charlotte Bingham. She was 19 years old when she wrote this book, and it is a time capsule of the debutante life of another century—vivid descriptions of house parties with sweating glass punchbowls and chinless boys to dance with and yearning for … something. 

Bingham thinks what she needs is a man, but there is a melancholy beneath the prose that suggests that even within all the frivolousness of life, there’s an existential question of the self. Bingham is the daughter of the gentry; her mother wants her to leave school because “she doesn’t believe in girls knowing a frightful lot or going to university. She says they’re mucky, the rooms of girls who go to university, I mean.” But then, a page later, Charlotte herself peeks through. “I went to the most super convent. All the nuns were marvelous; honestly, they were the most broadminded people you’ve ever met.… I bet if you met a saint he’d make Wyatt Earp look like a weed. Really, they had to be frightfully tough.” 

A Coronet Among the Weeds is not subversive or really interested in anything except parties and running around Paris. It’s a window into a world—and personality—that feels of this place but far away, and it makes me see the merits of bouffants and eyelash glue. 

“It used to be, you had parents. You just had them. Good and bad hadn’t been invented yet.” This is what 12-year-old Suzanna overhears in her grandmother’s living room as her grandmother and her friends, all former members of the American Communist party, lament over the children who won’t talk to them anymore. Family estrangement is a theme that runs throughout Harriet Clark’s new novel, The Hill. In the book, Suzanna contends with being the daughter of a woman who has been sentenced to life in prison. 

Suzanna’s mother was a revolutionary. She drove the getaway car during a bank robbery for a leftist splinter cell, which resulted in the death of a bank security guard. She has been in prison for as long as Suzanna remembers; it’s a place that sits at the top of a hill, and Suzanna visits nearly every weekend from her childhood into her adolescence. Suzanna’s maternal grandmother refuses to go to the prison or speak to her daughter, and much of the novel is about this stalemate between the two women and Suzanna’s conflicting loyalties to both. 

But this is also a book about the elasticity of time. “My mother and I lived on the timeless peak of a time-bound hill,” Suzanna says at a certain point, before conceding that time itself is a “punishment.” There is simultaneously too much time to live through—a whole life in prison!—and not enough, as Suzanna’s visits contain all that is unsaid about her family. In her life with her grandmother, it’s the same: endless afternoons listening to her grandmother and her friends lament the world, with the poignant understanding that Suzanna’s grandmother is closer to death than life, and the bubble of semiprotection she provides is close to breaking. 

Suzanna’s grandmother is not a warm presence. She is a stubborn woman who refuses to tell Suzanna her family’s history; who makes Suzanna promise to not have children to ensure their familial line ends; who, we find out, at the end of her life, sits in judgment of herself and her failings as a mother. It’s a testament to Harriet Clark’s skill that the true subject of this novel—the long, damaging legacy of three generations of mother-daughter estrangement—slowly reveals itself, as we follow Suzanna to and from the prison and watch CourtTV with her grandmother.

This is Clark’s debut novel—one she has been working on for over a decade. She herself is the daughter of Judy Clark, a former member of the Weather Underground who drove the getaway car for the group during a 1981 bank robbery in Nyack, New York, that resulted in the deaths of a security guard and two police officers. Convicted and sentenced to three consecutive sentences of 25 years to life, she was granted parole in 2019. The Hill is obviously in conversation with Harriet Clark’s autobiography, but in its dedication to Suzanna’s interior life and larger questions of the nature of family legacy and forgiveness, it is a work of fiction.

I am making this novel sound dour, but it is one of the funniest books I have read in a while, with deadpan one-liners, bitterly comic in the way only someone aware of the stakes can make a joke. During one long sequence, Suzanna’s mother becomes a dog trainer in prison and Suzanna becomes jealous of the animals: 

“Do you ever dress them up?” I asked my mother…

“These are service dogs, Suzanna. Service animals.” Said the way someone, offended, might say, “But he’s the Pope.” 

The Hill is a meditative book, one that mimics the experience of waiting out a clock, how senses slow and realizations coalesce and something that seemed small a moment ago—the color of a grandmother’s wig or the illustration in a children’s Bible—take on significance in the mirror of hindsight.

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Jordy Rosenberg, author of the novels  Confessions of the Fox and most recently, this year, Night Night Fawn.

Jordy Rosenberg: “In the winter of 2021, my partner and I were living in Eastham, Massachusetts, at the edge of the forest in a little rental intended to give us some Covid-era breathing room. I loved the forest, but my partner less so. Also, the house was festooned in seashell decor and infested with mice. I was revising Night Night Fawn during this time, mostly at the kitchen table. The book had another title then, and it was not only different from the novel that it became—one told from the point of view of a transphobic mother being cared for by her trans son—it was perhaps its polar opposite: a memoir told from mine. Perhaps my decision to invert the memoir into a novel in which I am only a side character was influenced by the upside-down life we were living: my partner mourning her beloved NYC and her seashell-flanked situation, me overawed by our minusculeness in the face of the pandemic, the constant mice, the coyotes hot-footing at the edges of the property, and the gangs of turkeys that would appear like squinting, unappeasable judges. We were organizing by Zoom all that winter and into the spring—against furloughs and firings, for Cops Off Campus and solidarity with Save Sheikh Jarrah—while the wind skeltered through the coastal forest and everywhere turned to mud.”