Tidal Lock
Just Published: Lindsay Hill's triumphant second novel
Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 1/15/25
$24.00 clothbound, 978-1620540633, 160 pages, 5.5 x 8.5"
First serial to New England Review
The term "tidal lock" refers to the locked rotation between two celestial bodies orbiting each other closely — the term explains, for example, why we can only ever see one side of the moon and the back remains hidden from us. Olana, or rather the narrator of Tidal Lock, who is "sometimes" called Olana, as she explains to us, exists in a similar orbit with her own memories of childhood that remain inaccessible to her due to trauma. She can circle them again and again, but they ultimately remain out of reach for her like the dark side of the moon. The result is the harrowing story of a young woman trying to solve the mystery of her father's disappearance years ago.
This slim novel, which consists of 265 shard-like, titled passages divided into four parts, maintains a mysterious arc of suspense: the narrator's trauma is gradually revealed to us as she uncovers it herself. The shadowy landscape around us sharpens and "patience brings rewards and revelations" (Kirkus Reviews). Is Olana's father dead or just missing? Who is this woman who claims to be her mother? Where is Olana, does the city she thinks she is in exist, or is it only in her head? Amid all her inner turmoil, Olana remains alert, persistent, sarcastic, witty, defiant... and rises in her courageous transformation from a trapped existence to the freedom and generosity of a newly imagined self.
Lindsay Hill enchants with his exquisite choice of words, with his formal innovation, and above all with the intensity of the emotions that he expresses in such succinct brevity.
"We live in a world full of trauma and fear, where it’s often hard to confront, or even admit, exactly what has happened to us. The human mind is endlessly creative at finding ways to cope, though, and many of us don’t even realize the intricate web of fictions we’ve created for ourselves. Lindsay Hill’s new novel, Tidal Lock , explores this vast emotional space between what actually happened and what can currently be faced by one troubled, yet clever young woman whose name is 'sometimes Olana.' . . . Tidal Lock is a short and powerful novel, with deep poetic leanings. It’s about family and loss, and soulful searching. The most surprising thing, to me, given how thickly coded the book felt at the beginning, is how thoroughly the story finds its way to clarity in the end. Secrets are revealed; and the reasons for the heavy veil become clear as well. . . . If you’re like me, once you turn the last page, the beginning will call to you again. To return, to revisit, and to see the dark side of the moon, finally, through knowing eyes."— Mary Lynn Read, The Literary Heist (www.literaryheist.com)
[See also below for the full review.]
“Tidal Lock is a tour de force — a gorgeous, devastating story about a lost, absent father and a neglected daughter. Brilliant and heartbreaking, it is the best, most inventive novel I’ve read in ages.” —Margaret McMullan, author of Aftermath and Where the Angels Lived
"Tidal Lock is so richly metaphorical that I could not divorce its deft magic from my own memories and circumstances. Like Kazuo Ishiguro's Unconsoled or J. Robert Lennon's Pieces for the Left Hand, this is a literary marvel at once unsettling and familiar, elusive and intentional. I absolutely love this book." —Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra
About the author
Lindsay Hill was born in San Francisco and graduated from Bard College. Since 1974 he has published six books of poetry* and his work has appeared in many literary journals. Sea of Hooks, his first novel and the product of nearly twenty years' work, was published by McPherson in 2013. Prior to being awarded the 2014 PEN USA Fiction Prize, Publishers Weekly declared Sea of Hooks “the most underrated novel of 2013.” Lindsay Hill lives in Los Angeles.
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.
CHRONOGRAM
Tidal Lock is Hill's first novel in over a decade since Sea of Hooks (2013). Prior to novel-writing, the Bard College alumnus was known for his six books of poetry. His new novel . . . blends together reality and illusion in a psychological slow burn. Olana, the protagonist, begins to question the world she lives in and the people around her as she unravels the mysterious disappearance of her father. It's a narrative-heavy book split into sections that are a few sentences to a few paragraphs long. The trippy pacing and uncertainty of time leaves the reader to unravel the mystery alongside Olana.
THE LITERARY HEIST
Searching for the Dark Other Side, a review by Mary Lynn Reed of Tidal Lock by Lindsay Hill
12/20/24 in The Literary Heist : www.literaryheist.com
"We live in a world full of trauma and fear, where it’s often hard to confront, or even admit, exactly what has happened to us. The human mind is endlessly creative at finding ways to cope, though, and many of us don’t even realize the intricate web of fictions we’ve created for ourselves. Lindsay Hill’s new novel, Tidal Lock , explores this vast emotional space between what actually happened and what can currently be faced by one troubled, yet clever young woman whose name is “sometimes Olana.” In a sequence of short, titled passages that read more like prose poems than chapters, Olana’s nonlinear story unfolds.
Olana is in search of her “missing” father. But quickly we, the readers -- and more slowly, Olana -- realize that this story isn’t going to follow a straight line. Is Olana’s father truly “missing”? Where, and who, is Olana’s mother? There appear to be several candidates for that role, and Olana isn’t fond of any of them. And where is Olana, for that matter? Is the place of this story’s telling heaven or hell? Is it an abandoned movie theater, a town at the edge of Death Valley, or a city made of cardboard? Or is Olana in some kind of transit station? A place “between” what’s real and what’s not?
Tidal Lock is a jigsaw puzzle of prose where the box with the picture on the cover has been lost, so you must rely on the incremental placing of one piece next to another. Lindsay Hill is a master puzzle-designer, and while many of the small pieces may look alike, no two are identical. The titles of the 265 short passages in Tidal Lock are not all distinct, for example. Some, like “Needles,” “Fairy Tale,” “Trains,” and “Tracks” return as many as six to eight times, dropping hints to our subconscious. If Tidal Lock were a painting, it would be a wall-size Jackson Pollock abstract whose swirls and drips of paint were each made from perfectly clear, miniature realist Edward Hopper scenes.
Tidal Lock is full of short, intense passages that demand to be read out loud. They beg the reader to pause, and to ponder. Olana — and the entire world of Tidal Lock — exists on multiple planes. There is no apology for it, nor should there be. As Olana tells us in an early section titled 'Doubling': My father said having a single identity was like building a house around you with no doors. So doubling wasn’t lying exactly. It was just a way to find a way out of yourself. (pg. 16)
Preoccupations abound in Olana’s world. Demolition sites, documentaries, midnight, language, and buttons – plenty of buttons. As a child, Olana cut buttons from people’s coats and collected them, marveling at their beauty. She finds them on the street, in debris. Broken or whole, buttons are the things that persist for Olana. They cast spells and conjure fairy tales. She even stalks “The Button-Chooser,” a mythical creature (a woman, of course) who works in a factory somewhere, doing the magical work of choosing buttons for garments.
Amid all these buttons, inside prose-poem chapters, individually titled, and often philosophical, it’s hard not to conjure thoughts of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Yet where Stein’s “buttons” are stream-of-conscious on the edge of nonsensicality, Hill’s are decidedly self-conscious and rational, though often thickly coded.
Particularly in the first portion of the book, the Tidal Lock narrative feels like a boxer warming up for a fight. Those short, prose poem sections jab and jostle us, this way and that. Even within a section, a scene, or a paragraph, there’s a persistent taunting. The voice is breathless — often filled with em-dashes -- no time to wait for a comma, or a period.
Do you think the dead can love more fiercely than the living -- alive to loss as they are -- being dead -- alive to every foothold being fragile -- the taken for granted hold you have on things -- every taken for granted handhold in the world -- like the way the living can fiercely love the dead but in reverse? Nothing is taken for granted by the dead. To love like that is what I’m thinking of. (from a section titled 'Mirror of the Dead,' pg. 11)
Hill establishes an intimacy with the reader through multiple instances of near-direct address, ultimately breaking the fourth wall completely as the narrator reveals the meaning of the title of the book:
In case you haven’t already looked it up -- tidal lock means not being able to see the other side of something. You can’t see the other side of the moon because the moon is tidally locked with the earth in its orbit for example. Venus and earth are tidally locked. No one knows why. Things you can’t turn from -- things you can’t shake -- how the past turns its single face to you -- how all you can’t remember lies on its dark other side. (from a section titled “Tidal Lock,” pg. 63)
Tidal Lock is a short and powerful novel, with deep poetic leanings. It’s about family and loss, and soulful searching. The most surprising thing, to me, given how thickly coded the book felt at the beginning, is how thoroughly the story finds its way to clarity in the end. Secrets are revealed; and the reasons for the heavy veil become clear as well.
Tidal Lock is not a book you will quickly forget. Nor are you likely to want to immediately frame and hang your completed jigsaw on the wall. If you’re like me, once you turn the last page, the beginning will call to you again. To return, to revisit, and to see the dark side of the moon, finally, through knowing eyes."
Sample: CI: You’re writing a character that might be read as unreliable to reality, to language itself. Were you thinking a lot about breaking language when you wrote this book?
LH: I spent a lot of time in my poetic work breaking language because I had started out writing fairly traditional poetry, and I realized I needed to break that structure in order to express things that were more complex and interesting. Olana is not simply unreliable. Almost everything that she asserts is in fact the case. It’s just asserted in a symbolic, allegorical way. If this book can be successful to readers, which is an open question, Olana is not simply unreliable, and she’s not simply crazy. That’s part of the ambiguity that I hope the reader will come in contact with.