Tidal Lock by Lindsay Hill (Reviewed by Vincent Czyz) 

“What we mean is always on the other side.”

—Robert Kelly, from “Adriatic”

Lindsay Hill, a native of San Francisco, made his writerly bones as a poet. His debut collection, Avelaval, was released in 1974, a year before he graduated from Bard College. He went on to publish five more collections, including Contango (2006) and The Empty Quarter (2010), his most recent. In 2013, however, he veered off into prose, and McPherson & Co. published his first novel, Sea of Hooks. Reputedly 20 years in the making, it won the PEN Center USA Fiction Award, the 2015 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction, and the 2016 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award. It was also among the titles Publishers Weekly named "Most Underrated Books of the Year" for 2013. I must admit it escaped my notice till now, as did Hill’s poetry collections. Tidal Lock, which hit bookshelves at the end of 2024, is my introduction to his oeuvre. 

The narrator is Olana (possibly a pseudonym), a woman of indeterminate age whose father abandoned her and his wife under hazy circumstances when Olana was 13 (that was “years ago”). Whenever precisely Dad pulled his disappearing act, a clock stopped. From this moment on Olana becomes a collection of eccentric habits and odd obsessions—with buttons, with a dilapidated cinema called the Pix (where she watches nonexistent films), with buildings slated for demolition, with salvaging items from the condemned buildings before their controlled implosions. In a ritual she’s invented and calls Scissor Day, she cuts “to pieces the thing that matters most” to her; photos of her father are the first to go on this “holiday in reverse.” 

Olana’s fixation on her abandonment reminds me of Great Expectations’ Miss Havisham, who goes on wearing her tattered wedding dress for decades, fails to dispose of the decomposing wedding cake, and haunts a mansion she’s allowed to fall into decay since the moment she learns her husband-to-be has deserted her. I’m reminded also of Absalom, Absalom!’s Rosa Coldfield, a spinster “wearing the eternal black which she had worn for 43 years.” Inspired, perhaps, by Dickens’s jilted bride, Coldfield, also reeling from a broken-off engagement, shuts herself up in a deteriorating house bequeathed to her by her father. Faulkner’s wronged bride-to-be is motivated more by grudge than grief, and there are other differences between the women, but the lives of all three are dominated by exaggerated reactions to loss. The result is a before and an after even more definitive for them than the death of Christ was for Western civilization (and the calendar). 

Olana, referring to her own situation, points out that grief for the missing is different from grief for the dead: “you don’t know where they are or why they left or what’s become of them—and do they think of you at all …” Since the loss of her father is the center from which all are things are measured, much of Tidal Lock consists of her conjuring up different lives for her father in different locations, often settling him in Needles, a desert city in California. “Everyone in Needles is missing from somewhere else,” she says, “at least that’s the way I imagine it ....”

Where exactly Olana is, is equally a mystery (other than a city she refuses to name). Perhaps the city she describes is an amalgam of the places she’s lived or just imagined she’s lived, such as Needles. A dying city in any case, half in ruin, sparsely populated. As readers, we can’t help noticing, even if only subliminally, that the outer desolation matches her inner devastation. Not surprisingly, Olana has created a narrowly bounded world so as not to face the real one and what happened in it. “I think if you’re going to make a private sense of the world,” she says, “you have to let go of the common world to do it. Like leaping from a swing as a child when the swing is at its apex. You have to apply yourself to a kind of flight.” 

Elsewhere in the novel, Olana complains that “Things on the map I stole are not where I used to think they were. Things are like that a lot I’ve noticed lately.” This indeterminacy is endemic to Tidal Lock. In addition to not knowing how old Olana is or where she lives, we don’t know how or why her father left her (there are several accounts). No one in the novel other than Olana is named. Her therapist, for example, gets nothing more than a nickname (Dr. Winker), and there are intimations he doesn’t exist. There’s also a mysterious woman Olana calls the holder: “because she holds me here—this roof over my head—scant food—a few coins here and there …” The holder, who lives elsewhere in the nameless city, “wanders her life like a person with a metal detector at the beach. I think she lost a daughter and can’t accept it. Now she keeps me.” 

Structurally, the novel closely resembles Fernando Pessoa’s classic, The Book of Disquiet, although I hasten to point out the latter isn’t a novel but a collection of prose poems consisting primarily of the memories, musings, and observations of the narrator, Bernardo Soares, who is the lynchpin holding the book together. Similarly, Tidal Lock’s 159 pages contain brief passages, many only a paragraph long, that are as lyrical and self-contained as prose poems but nonetheless tell a story and do indeed add up a novel. One of the shortest:

Night

In the night in the night that pulls the parts of the day apart and hurls them sideways inside the furnace of sleep the windows have no glass no frames no walls the windows are the windows the wind is when the wind has its hand full of daylight and who knows what—and who remembers ever buttoning anything in a dream—in the hurricane of night—where things that hold to world together are lost. [p. 38]

Windows, as well as doors, are motifs used to striking effect throughout the novel. So are buildings, rooms, and houses; these, after all, are structures that house us and can even stand in for us (Jung believed a house in a dream represented the self), just as, allegedly, our bodies house our souls. Notice also Hill manages a sly reference to buttons in the above passage. 

Hill’s prose, which is the real hero of this novel, is worth examining. Hill keeps punctuation to a minimum, doing without staples, such as commas and question marks, although he has no such aversion to the dash. He also keeps his language basic. The poetry is achieved without the kinds of words to which Faulkner and David Foster Wallace were addicted. The last line of a given section, as in a poem, tends to make the rest of passage, which a moment earlier seemed made of some unreflective material, shimmer. 

Another excerpt: 

Rain

I woke with a start. The rain sounded like thousands of snapping sticks—like the stick-house of my life coming down. Memory is a fire made only for rain my father had said. Now I knew that Lethe was not a river at all—it was a downpour—and in that deluge was a doorway beyond which stretched the arid streets of the underworld and the underworld tidal lock on those who walked them. And I saw how every doorway is a standing rainless replica of that vertical river of forgetting—that river that divides the world from the underworld. [154]

Notice there’s hardly a word in this section the average eighth-grader wouldn’t know, and yet the effect Hill achieves is extraordinary. There are over 250 sections and while they’re not all equally dazzling, just about every one is a head-turner. We’re enchanted not so much by the beauty of imagery as by that of analogy, le métaphore juste, the gorgeous concretizing of an emotion or a thought or the metaphysical. I kept wondering how long he could keep up this virtuoso performance—well, for 159 pages. 

Lovely as the writing is, the novel isn’t without its flaws. Olana, for example, is less a character than a disembodied voice (but what a voice!). There are no descriptions of her—or at least nothing that sticks in memory—we don’t know her age or what she does with most of her day (she seems not to have a job), and I never formed an image of her. The other nameless humans in the book are even more shadowy. While this might suggest Olana is a kind of Orpheus searching the underworld—her collapsing, half-deserted city—not for Eurydice but for her father—making those around her shades—the story’s allegorical aspect won’t be of much comfort to readers who enjoy well-drawn characters. Nor is there any dialogue or character interaction to speak of.

I also have to wonder why a grown woman as perceptive and observant as Olana relies on someone to bring her scraps of food and spare change (I wonder also how Olana pays for a therapist, unless, of course, he’s imaginary). The obvious answer is that, like Miss Havisham, she’s crippled by grief, which, as in the case of Great Expectations, seems to me a bit excessive.

Another issue is that the narrative proceeds in fragments and can at times feel disjointed. The unreality of place—that is, the inability on the part of the reader to distinguish real settings from imagined (as well as real events from daydreamed scenarios)—tends to keep you off balance. Clearly this is an aesthetic choice Hill has made, but it sometimes adds to a sense of abstraction and insubstantiality, a lack of grounding.

Whatever its drawbacks, Tidal Lock is an impressive achievement—a mood piece, a sustained lament, a haunting ode to being adrift in the world. Although it doesn’t aspire to be detective fiction, a mystery resides at its core, while a litany of existential enigmas on the periphery sprawl well beyond the borders of the book—questions about the nature of time, memory, myth, death, the past, the human condition, narrative itself. “I call this city Tidal Lock,” Olana says. It “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.”

Of the many books that seek to explore the dark side of the phenomenal world, to read visible surfaces and compose an explanatory metaphysics or to understand their psychological import, Tidal Lock is one of the best. “I’m a romantic I guess,” Olana says, “meaning, I think there’s something behind all of this—that all of this stands for something—points to something—has music behind it—something like that—something shining through from behind—not that music shines—really—but you know what I mean ….” Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, his best work in my opinion, gestures longingly in that direction but never gets there. Nor does Kerouac, though in Visions of Cody the desire is unmistakably there. This puts Hill in the company of the likes of Melville (recall Ahab’s “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. […] If man will strike, strike through the mask!”), Julio Cortazar (who in Hopscotch calls the meta-realm “yonder”), and Pessoa, all of whom who succeed in making genuine inroads into how the human psyche sees itself by the light of the visible. And that is no mean feat.

***

Vincent Czyz is the author of two short story collections, one of which won the Eric Hoffer Award for Best in Small Press, two novels, a novella, and an essay collection. He is the recipient of two fiction fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts, the W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction, and the Capote Fellowship at Rutgers University. He has placed stories in Shenandoah, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Southern Indiana Review, Tampa Review, Georgetown Review, Tin House, and Copper Nickel, among other publications.