TIDAL LOCK

A young woman tries to find a straightforward narrative track amid a tangle of unreliable memories.

The poet Hill’s first novel in a decade—following the award-winning Sea of Hooks (2013)—seems to present life itself as an existential mystery. “My name is sometimes Olana,” says the narrator, who leaves everyone else either unnamed or with a nickname. “My father was thirty-nine when he disappeared. I was thirteen. This was years ago” is how she explains the pivotal point of reference to which the narrative keeps circling back: They had boarded a train but he returned to the station, leaving her onboard. That was the last she saw of him. Perhaps. She now lives somewhere in the middle of nowhere, a place without a name, desolate and barely populated. Or maybe she lives inside the labyrinth of her mind. She doesn’t believe the woman who calls herself her mother is so. She has no idea how and why she came to be seeing the therapist she isn’t sure is a therapist. She keeps going to movies at an abandoned theater, where there is no one to tell the disembodied voices around her to keep quiet. Every chunk of narrative (generally little more than a paragraph) has a title, and most seem disconnected from the one preceding or following. Though it looks like the protagonist is getting nowhere, and the reader as well, the narrator frequently advises that “the past is patient.” Patience brings rewards and revelation. Is the narrator in hell? (Maybe.) Is there a way out? What happened to her father? Was she complicit? What about this woman who says she’s her mother? As the narrator comes to learn, “Sometimes life seems less the sum of the choices you’ve made and more the remainder of the subtractions you’ve endured.” Maybe it’s all just a matter of tricky arithmetic.

Very controlled writing and challenging reading.