Tidal Lock, Lindsay Hill’s second novel, might just as easily be called a commonplace book or a work of long-form  prose poetry. Essay, story, case study, character sketch, or something in between, what Tidal Lock offers is undeniably beautiful and haunting. The novel is at once an elegy to consciousness overwhelmed by grief and a kaleidoscopic exploration of the ambiguity of memory. 

The book begins in ruins. The city surrounding the narrator, who identifies herself as Olana, is collapsing. So, too, are Olana’s memories. The story serves as a record of the city that is falling to pieces around Olana and of her own warped memory as she tries to trace what is  left. Rather than run for cover, Olana moves deeper into the surrounding ruins, in prose that exhibits an orbiting, circular logic until it’s unclear whether the  city is a location at all or the figurative site of Olana herself: “The building collapsing in the  corner is collapsing in here—in me. The building being demolished down the street is being  demolished in me […] I start where I am standing and I stop at the horizon—just like everybody  else.” 

Hill’s strength as a prose artist is on full display in this novel. Using deceptively simple language, he raises existential questions through deeply moving imagery. What are the limits of the self? How are those limits measured when humans have so often considered themselves the opposite of  their environment? What portion of the self is organic and what portion constructed?

The line between replica and replicated blurs as the novel advances. A fairy tale Olana recalls is the plot of the novel we’re reading; an incantated opposition between “the imagined and retrieved” (fiction versus fact) becomes “conjoined” and “twinned”; paper people who live in “flat” worlds that can be folded like origami might reflect the narrator’s own growing awareness that she is a character in a book. 

From these conceptually stirring iterations of simulacra, real and singular truths emerge. Tidal Lock is an object lesson in the fiction of ideas, and Hill sprinkles them generously throughout. “Maybe myth is a way to talk about what’s true in a way that gives it meaning—like identity is a way to talk about your self that’s more meaningful than  true,” is one example. Here is another: “If  there’s one thing I know, it’s two things—you can’t protect people from the life they want—or  yourself from loving them.” A third has the texture of a home truth: “Don’t pretend you haven’t pretended to be blind—to not see what’s in front of  you—right there—and wanting sympathy for not being able to see it.” 

For all his conceptual emphasis, Hill does not stint on plot. A mystery develops from different characters who stand in unknown relation to Olana. There is a woman, referred to as “the  holder,” who is deeply invested in Olana’s life for reasons that Olana doesn’t understand. There is also a lost father, whose erasure from Olana’s  life becomes increasingly suspicious, until the reader realizes what has driven him away and where he’s gone. Most compellingly, as the story develops, the narrator’s trustworthiness slowly erodes, not because she is being  duplicitous but because her memory is damaged by whatever has happened to her father and, by extension, to her. 

While these tensions provide forward momentum, the relationship between cause and effect is compromised repeatedly, so that events that have already been extensively narrated are re-introduced as though for the first time. This might be  reflective of the slipperiness of memory morphed by shock, but it might also enact a motif of division. The book is riddled with gaps. Hill’s imagery includes scissors slicing through photos to dispel the myth of cohesion; doors closing to prevent movement between rooms; bridgeless bodies of water; buttons cleaving disparate sides of a shirt. Division happens in syntax, too, as the prose is often punctuated in em-dashes that both separate and connect different thoughts. Even Olana’s development follows the pattern, as she becomes a disembodied voice attempting to chain events together, an act of self-assertion as powerful as it is heartbreaking.

This motif of fragments becomes an apt metaphor for a young woman assembling the pieces of her life and her story, but the novel reads more like a prism than a mosaic. Parts are refracted and re-cast, leaving the whole picture elusive; instead, each reading—each new angle—reveals fresh dimensions in the narrative’s contours. 

I will admit here that I read the book three times. In the first, the novel felt like a treatise or confessional; in the second, it felt like a thriller or mystery; by the third, it seemed to be a metafictional poem. In all of these readings, Hill’s commitment to seeing the world estranged permits him to present it with more nuance and detail. For Olana this is an inherently risky move, as there is a tipping point when salutary attention to those details shifts into compulsive over-analysis, moments when Olana is probing too deeply. The result is near-depersonalization. But the reader—or at least, this reader—empathizes with Olana. Her depersonalization has come about because of gaps crafted by grief.  

And therein lies the significance of the novel’s title. A tidal lock is the  celestial phenomenon of a planetary body so perfectly mirroring another planetary body’s orbit  that one side of each is never faced. This is true of Earth’s own moon. Its dark half is invisible so long as we stay on the Earth’s crust. But what does it mean to never see that other side—and what does it mean to be that way with another person, whose other, shadowed side is never confronted or experienced? What about the shadowed side of the self?

This might be the book’s greatest lesson (and pleasure): the more Olana shares, the more palpable the weight of what’s left unsaid. In that silence, the story is at its most kinetic and visceral, even as it points to its own artifice. As with his first novel, Sea of Hooks, Hill has elegantly challenged the role of storytelling in sense-making. We do not tell stories to reflect reality, Hill suggests; rather, we tell stories to construct reality. In both novels, narration is as much about diversion and avoidance as it is about confession. This is how each re-reading of a Hill novel feels like an entrance into a brand new book. What persists is Hill’s breathtaking capacity for using stories as mechanisms to expose how flawed the human being is—in body, in spirit, and (most of all) in mind. 

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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.” Hill lives in Los Angeles.

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Lindsey Drager’s books have been finalists for two Lambda Literary Awards, made the longlist for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and have variously been translated into Spanish and Italian. She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Shirley Jackson Award, an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Bard Fiction Prize. In 2025 Drager was a finalist for the John Dos Passos Award for Literature, which recognizes “novelists and storytellers whose published works defy literary conventions and experiment with form.”