If you're looking for a respite from the horror of the last three years, read "Hiking Underground"

A novel written prior to the global rollout of "the virus" reaffirms the world we all but lost because of it

It gives me great pleasure—and may provide you some relief—to announce the publication of Hiking Underground, a novel by Amy Smiley. I recommend this lovely book (whose author is my wife) as an invaluable respite from the horror that surrounds us.

Hiking Underground is an exquisite story of three people in New York City, told through their respective streams of consciousness, as they interact with one another, others, and the natural world. I’ll let the novel’s blurb, and first reviews, give you a fuller sense of its extraordinary style and structure (see below).

Especially in light of what we’ve all been through since “COVID” struck , Hiking Underground is an exquisite celebration of life. Such life includes the subtle currents of psychology, and interplay of consciousness with consciousness (Amy having been influenced by Henry James, Joyce, Proust and Virginia Woolf, among others); and, as well, life as enriched and deepened by immersion in the natural world (Amy having been influenced therein by Thoreau, Rousseau and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), and in the arts (especially painting—such as the Hudson River School, and Albert Pinkham Ryder). And such life also includes (speaking of taboos!) maternal love, Hiking Underground having been “written under the star of motherhood” (a feature of its subtle feminism). Although not written as a protest, then (nor does it read as one), this novel is, implicitly, a reaffirmation of the human world that has been snatched from us by digital “community,” “woke” dogma and “COVID” paranoia.

This is, in short, a book that those of us at war today may read, and maybe should, to help maintain our souls, so that the war does not itself destroy them, as all wars tend to do, and this one, as a planetary struggle, surely must, if we give in to it. Beyond its myriad aesthetic pleasures, then, Hiking Underground may be a sort of vital supplement, to keep our hearts and minds alive in this last, greatest of all fights.

The following blurbs and reviews, and other pertinent material, are all available at amysmiley.com:

“In Hiking Underground, Amy Smiley has written a dreamy meditation on intimacy and inner growth, with a Woolf-like attention to interior voices. A lovely meditation on inter-relationship.”

—Naomi Wolf, author of The Bodies of Others (2022).

"To read Hiking Underground is to enter the slipstream of three equally compelling psyches and to fall into a trance of empathy. Smiley brilliantly evokes the tension between reverie and reality in this deeply humane, beautifully original novel.”

—Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of The Great Man (2007) and The Last Cruise (2018).

“Smiley keeps the reader of Hiking Underground rapt in anticipation, waiting not for some plot conflict resolution, but for the different variations on the novel’s theme to converge, which they do, with delightful intricacy. Smiley writes for artists.” 

—V. N. Alexander, author of Locus Amoenus (2015).

“Amy Smiley’s subtle triangular rotation evokes a New York City dreamscape that suggests a new, Manhattan version of Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant—a vision that Aragon would have found delightful for its freshness and invention, its crisscrossing of myth and wit, its reverence for the city and wonder for nature.”

—Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 

“This remarkable book will hold you in its grasp from the first word to the last. Illuminated by descriptions of ordinary things in urban daily life that subtly become far more than mundane, the novel is filled with domestic details that echo with deep significance. Its characters live on different planes of consciousness, and Smiley guides the reader into their depths and across their surfaces. Smiley has an uncanny ability to direct readers’ attention to the tiny details of how things come into being — from the emergence of a painting from an artist’s canvas to the emergence of plants and birds from among the concrete blocks and buildings of a city. Hiking Underground is an engrossing narrative, original in its conception, and so powerful that it will forever change the way you pay attention to the world around you.”

—Emily Martin, author of Experiments of the Mind: From the Cognitive Psychology Lab to the World of Facebook and Twitter (2022).

A review from Literary Titan:

https://literarytitan.com/2023/01/07/hiking-underground/

A review by D. Donovan for the Midwest Book Review, to be published in March:

Hiking Underground

Amy Smiley

Atmosphere Press

978-1-63988-592-3 $17.99

www.atmospherepress.com

"Was the whole world dreaming, or just one young woman?"

Hiking Underground is a novel about ordinary daily life in New York City that assumes the surreal overlay of descriptive personal experience. It opens with the chapter 'I. Alice', which poses the image of a woman who "...always walked between two worlds, so it was hard to say where one began and the other ended."

The juxtaposition of these milieus leads Alice and her readers into her past and present, from recovering from a tonsillectomy as an adult to rejecting the vapid reactions and popularity of teens in favor of an individualistic attitude that leads a boy to love her because "...it was the very thing that made her beautiful, said the first boy who ever loved her—that way she had of expressing what lived inside of her, while others seemed to rove around, staring into cyberspace as they chatted from the sides of their mouths."

From her middle-class New Jersey roots into adulthood, Alice has been stirred and shaken by the influences and tides of society and her own role as an outside observer during much of it. Between her relationship to mother Jenna, who observes her daughter with mixed pride and puzzlement, to the tides of life which wash her from past memory to present-day experiences and choices, Alice's world and conundrums come to life with simple, yet powerful reflections: "It was all she ever wanted, to love with ease and laugh with ease. To just be."

Her father Hank might also wonder about the inevitable progression of his life away from its dreams:

"For all she knew, her father, Hank, was at his desk at that very moment, staring off into space and measuring the gulf between himself and the world around him, full of disgust for family, work, and all the other absurd conventions that pinned him down when what he really wanted from life was adventure. That was gone now, beaten out of him, and it was getting harder to find a reason to go on doing anything at all."

Amy Smiley draws this family's disparate individuals and their dreams together with the deftness of a tightly-knitted emotional quilt of dreams. She captures, within this overlay, a sense of life's changes and the unexpected influences that both attract and pull apart individuals, families, and relationships.

Her close attention builds atmospheric detail, philosophical and psychological reflection, and close inspection of other characters' lives (such as Emma, who tackles the challenges of motherhood with an attention to detail that belays any insufficiencies in traditional approaches):

"But when it came to assuredness, one could find it in the way she gripped rocks and branches on a steep hike, or how she could reveal the essence of an object in a drawing, or how she could become one with the rain when she ran across a soaking lawn. So motherhood was not a thing she took for granted, ever, and doubted it was even a universal condition. Every day brought with it different demands, challenging her to figure things out as best she could."

Son Adam reflects part of his mother's fluid fascination with life's realities and demands: "When did a person enter sequential history, Emma wondered. And at what age would Adam distinguish his imaginings from real possibility? She wasn’t sure she always lived by such distinctions herself."

As mother and son move through urban and nature worlds, the paintings and metamorphosis that links Emma, Adam, and Alice become evocative dances that move through seemingly disparate personalities to make deft connections. The result is a novel that reaches out and grasps the heart of life's progression and the family relationships that form, break away, then rejoin in unexpected ways.

Libraries looking for powerful stories of everyday life juxtaposed against the undercurrent of extraordinary abilities and observations will find the descriptions and connections of Hiking Underground a surreal, compelling attraction.