In Christine Brooke-Rose's Textermination, literary characters descend upon the Convention of Prayer for Being in San Francisco, demanding from their readers continued recognition and, therefore, life. Just as Hill here pays tribute to James's imagining of the interior lives of women, I should like to suggest that Hill is also gesturing toward her literary constellation. While it may seem strange to align such an experimental writer as Hill with James and Wharton, there are telling similarities that remind us of the intercourse between modernism and postmodernism, and, particularly, the political and ethical subject matter of concern to both movements. At the same time, like them, Hill writes social fiction, paying especial attention to issues of gender and race, albeit in much more experimental fashion. And, like theirs, Hill's plots ride upon a steady determinist undercurrent against which her protagonists struggle in their search for self, that struggle set against a backdrop of intense social malaise, disease, or increasing chaos.
Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.
Hill's elaborations of a few such journeys are notable for their ludic transgression of realist conventions. Overly convoluted plots, extraordinary and deeply conflicted characters, unreliable narrators, inconclusive endings, temporal jump cuts, all these devices call attention repeatedly to the inevitable failure of fiction to determine what might always suffice as the authentic. Hill nevertheless holds out the tentative hope of understanding these seeming conspiracies of fate as well as the pure joy of individual awakenings. Even the titles transport us to different times and, so, to the possible convergence of parallel worlds. When I mentioned to my colleagues my excitement over the brilliant Henry James' Midnight Song, they misunderstood, exclaiming that they didn't know James had written a book entitled Midnight Song.