Family at the Most Basic Level in “Run for the Hills” https://ift.tt/l6O21C4
We begin in 1982 on an organic farm in Coalfield, Tennessee: “It was fall, the air cooling, and bird calls echoed across the trees through the valley.” Mad, short for Madeline, works alongside her dad, learning his ways, absorbing his wisdom and quiet affection. There’s syrup and sorghum and everything is sweet, full of whimsy. And this, dear reader, is when we know things are about to take a turn because this isn’t your traditional sweeping family saga. This is Run for the Hills, by Kevin Wilson, and if there’s one thing we know from Wilson’s previous titles — The Family Fang, Now Is Not the Time To Panic, Nothing to See Here, etc. — heartening and reverent are not as flagrant as quirk and character!
So we cut to twenty years later, and Mad is still working the organic farm with her mom; they’ve been featured in Bon Appétit and Southern Living and business is booming. But what’s missing is Chuck Hill, Mad’s father, as he split not long after that idyllic day the novel opened with. Instead, on this particular day working the farmer’s market, Mad watches as, of all things, a PT Cruiser plunks down the road. Enter Rube (short for Rueben) Hill, son of Charlie Hill, a forty-something who quickly identifies himself as Mad’s long-lost half-brother. As if this revelation isn’t alarming enough, Rube quickly reveals that he is not her only half-sibling. In fact, just as his father left him and his mother, then Mad and her mother, their father then went on to father and abandon two other children. Rube gathered this information through a private investigator who has revealed the Hill children’s father’s current location is in California.
After a brief meltdown, some delicious eggs, and a little soul-searching, Mad climbs into the Cruiser with Rube and the two set off in search of their half-sister and half-brother. Pep (Pepper) Hill, daughter of Chip Hill, is a senior on the University of Oklahoma women’s basketball team, and Tom (Theron) Hill, son of Carl Hill, is an 11-year-old aspiring filmmaker growing up in Utah. As the Hill siblings embark on their cross-country journey in pursuit of the man who gave them all their monikers, they quickly realize their height and last names aren’t all they have in common with their father.
Rube, like Charlie, is a crime novelist. Mad, like Chuck, is an organic farmer. Meanwhile, Pep found her love of basketball because of her dad, Coach Chip’s love of the game. And young Tom always has a camera in hand and films their journey because of the movie he and his dad were making before Carl’s sudden departure. While the Hill kids do not know what or who to expect as they make their way to California, the one thing they do learn for certain is that found family is as essential as the family you are born to.
A novel with this many abandoned, disgruntled people could make for wildly dramatic dialogue and problematic scenes, but it’s the subtle, quiet moments that pack the real punch: “Maybe the secret to pain was to acknowledge it, to admit that it hurt so bad, so you didn’t have to pretend that it didn’t. And maybe it didn’t go away. Maybe the secret to pain was to respond to it in ways that made the pain worth it.”
As with every Wilson novel, there is the perfect mixture of both the profound and the absurd. Conversations amongst the characters cruise as naturally as their car down the road, like when Mad says, “Oh, god. I cannot believe we are going to walk into this grocery store and buy food and, like, drive home and cook it and then sit at a table and have a family dinner.” Similarly, the understated but whip-smart statements embedded in every page seem effortless amongst the ridiculousness: “She nodded to him, and he nodded back. That was all family had to be, at the most basic level, someone seeing you, even if you didn’t know what they saw.”
Will the siblings find their father? If so, will he have another family? These details are revealed once they reach their destination, but what is certain immediately, without reaching the end of the novel, is that Wilson has again taken the “normal” family dynamic and flipped it on its head. He has taken an unlikely ensemble of endearing, quirky, and deeply realistic characters and developed them into their own original collaborative.
Run for the Hills is a story full of hope and humor. It teaches us the meaning of forgiveness and love. It has moments that leave the reader scratching their head and muttering WTF under their breath, but never in a bad way. Overall, Wilson delivers, once again, an empathetic, warm, sometimes over-the-top but always enjoyable journey of a story!
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