Book Review: Run For The Hills by Kevin Wilson

‘You weren’t supposed to suddenly get a new family at eleven o’clock on a Saturday after you’d sold out of eggs.’ So much of Kevin Wilson’s latest little delight of a novel might be unpicked from this single line that sets the stage for the plot of Run For The Hills at its very outset. This is a novel about what family is and what it can, could and should be; it is a novel about the inherent necessity and inherent fallibility and, indeed, silliness of the narratives we all rely upon to get through the world; and it is a novel that treats serious things in a tone that manages to be both airy and profound, witty and tender.

Madeline, Mad, Hill is the character who gets a new family on the Saturday morning after she sells out of eggs on her organic farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. Reuben, Rube, Hill is the successful mystery writer who shows up in a rented PT Cruiser (it’s 2007 and a ludicrous quest needs a ludicrous vehicle) bearing the news that he is Mad’s eldest half-sibling, that there are at least two more of them, that he thinks he knows where their father is, and that he wants Mad to accompany him in gathering all the abandoned children together and heading out for an overdue showdown with the man who has variously gone by Charles, Chuck, Chip and Carl Hill. Yes, like the sentence you just read, this is a lot to take in.

Needless to say, Mad says yes. So does college basketball star Pepper, Pep, Hill, and 11-year-old low-budget independent filmmaker Theron, Tom, Goudy (Hill?). Part of the shock that unites these disparate individuals is that their careers, seemingly so remote from each other, are all derived from the jobs of the father they knew in their respective childhoods. How they can all be following figuratively in the footsteps of the same man is one of the questions that brings them together in this mission to trace his path literally. And with it come uncomfortable questions about what it means to have a future shaped by a father who left you and how far, indeed, one’s future is shaped by one’s past.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Wilson’s book is that the bad guy is not a bad guy, and that the quest is barely dramatic at all, and yet the book itself is completely riveting. Only a writer with great assurance and sensitivity could pull this apparent contradiction off and teach us that every moment is both the culmination of something and the beginning of something else, but that almost nothing is ever as simple as it’s supposed to be.