VISITING HOURS

In Harriet Clark's début novel, a prisoner's daughter must find her way.

- BY JAMES WOOD

Amid visits to her mother, a girl must navigate a maternal legacy of radicalism.

The bildungsroman is the coming-of-age novel; it is also the coming-to-terms novel. The protagonist, usually a young man, undergoes a series of adventures that eventually spit him out wiser, stronger, set up for life’s journey. The form schools the hero in the ways of the world, and, even if he is rebellious (“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”) or cynical (“Sentimental Education”), the ways of the world are taken as given. Or even embraced: perhaps the genre’s best-loved example, “David Copperfield,” ends with marriage.

It is curious that the bildungsroman, officially committed to interrogating the world, should be so at home in it. Then again, the novel, a worldly form and rather proud of it, has good reason not to question the basic terms of our existence. We shouldn’t be surprised that, with a few notable exceptions, the novel avoids any fundamental metaphysical skepticism: it may be a largely secular genre, but its secularism is settled, not unduly tormented. Traditionally, the bourgeois novel questioned the viability of bourgeois life, not the viability of life itself.