47 pages • 1-hour read
Run for the Hills
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Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, racism, and gender discrimination.
Literary Context: The American Road Novel
The American cultural ethos is deeply intertwined with the myth of self-reinvention, the idea that one can shed the past and forge a new identity. This ideal, rooted in westward expansion and the concept of the “self-made man,” celebrates radical individualism and new beginnings. In Run for the Hills, Madeline “Mad” Hill, and her siblings Reuben “Rube” Hill, Pepper “Pep” Hill, and Theron “Tom” Goudy set out on their own subversive road trip venture. As they seek each other out and journey west to find their father, each individual sibling experiences a personal transformation. Their individual and collective journeys satisfy the road trip literary trope, which presents westward travels as crucial to self-reinvention, self-discovery, and ultimate personal fulfillment. At the same time, their journey subverts the trope because the siblings are pursuing rather than fleeing their past. Two of the characters are also women, which inherently disrupts the “go-west-young-man” stereotype that historically catered to pleasure- and fortune-seeking young white men, intertwined as it was with patriarchy and colonialism.
Meanwhile, Charles Hill’s character embodies a destructive version of this myth—serially reinventing himself and moving west over the course of several decades at the expense of his four children, Mad, Rube, Pep, and Tom, who reclaim their father’s story on their own terms. Charles’s freedom is built on the abandonment of his children, while his children find their freedom in pursuing their father (and their roots) before returning home.
The narrative vehicle for the Hill children’s reinvention is the classic American road trip, most famously explored in works like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, where travel symbolizes escape and self-discovery. Once again, the novel exposes the dark underside of the narrative: Whereas Charles’s journey is a journey away from responsibility and flight from settlement, the siblings’ journey is a direct confrontation with the past. As Rube puts it, their goal is to “re-create the migration of [their] father as he moved westward to start new chapters of his life” (29) in order to piece together the identity he shattered, turning a symbol of erasure into an act of reclamation.
Social Context: Redefining Family Beyond Biology and Tradition
The traditional American nuclear family, once the dominant social model, has undergone significant transformation. According to data from the Pew Research Center, the share of US children living in a two-parent household in their first marriage was below 50% by the mid-2010s, reflecting a rise in single-parent homes, blended families, and other diverse arrangements (“The American Family Today.” Pew Research Center, 17 Dec. 2015). This societal shift provides the backdrop for Run for the Hills, which challenges conventional definitions of kinship. When her half-brother Rube first appears, Mad’s immediate reaction is one of disbelief: “This wasn’t supposed to be how a family worked” (11). Her assumption is that family is a fixed unit one is born into, not something that can be added to in adulthood. The novel counters this notion by exploring the concept of “chosen family,” a term often used to describe non-biological support networks forged on the basis of shared experience and mutual support. Initially strangers, the Hill siblings are bound not by a shared upbringing but by a common trauma—their father’s abandonment. Their cross-country road trip becomes the process through which they build their own unique family structure. By the end of their journey, Mad assures Rube, “We’re family […] You have us now, okay?” (240). The novel furthers the contemporary American notion that the most resilient families are not always defined by blood or tradition but are actively constructed through a collective effort to heal and understand a fragmented past.
The Hill children’s paternity also echoes a recent proliferation of real-life documentaries on men who sired large numbers of children in covert or unethical ways. These documentaries include HBO’s Baby God, Netflix’s The Man with 1000 Kids, Hulu’s Spermworld, Netflix’s Our Father, and ABC’s The Doctor with Hundreds of Children. Not unlike Wilson’s novel, such stories explore how unlikely biological connections between estranged siblings might create unexpected family ties. Run for the Hills doesn’t overtly delve into the ethics of Charles’s decision-making but rather casts his history of paternity as a symptom of his unspecified mental illness.
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