Recommend: Yes.
It’s unfair of Tessa Hadley, really. She has elevated the short story stakes so high that it’s difficult for other authors to compete. For example, I rated Chris Flynn’s collection Here Be Leviathans as a ‘Recommend’ on the basis I had fun with it. But Flynn is just not in the same league as Hadley. He’s not to be blamed – very few are in the same league as Hadley.
At her best, she has such an intimate relationship with her characters. Most have a deep-rooted yearning that carries them through their life. Most have regrets and are constantly chasing after missed, or at the time underappreciated, opportunities. There is a real sense of age catching up in the rear-view mirror.
In a previous collection, Bad Dreams, there were two stories that demonstrated this quiet tendency of her characters to lift from a staid life into daydreams:
- Experience. A newly divorced woman moves into a near-stranger’s house while they are on holidays and discovers an old journal of sexual experiences that bewilder and intrigue our narrator. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/21/experience-5
- An Abduction. Not an abduction at all. A sensual experience befalls a teenager that lingers throughout her whole life. https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/aysegul-savas-reads-tessa-hadley
Like every short story collection every published, Hadley is not immune to a filler story. Children at Chess, unsurprisingly from the title, sucked. The Acknowledgements state that this story was ‘written for the Royal Academy Magazine, inspired by a painting by Mary Sargant Florence’. There’s also a dreary pandemic story, Coda, that falls flat. Hadley struggles to write the ‘everywoman’. Her strongest protagonists are the thinnest. I often think of them as older Joan Didion’s – figures of beauty falling into decay. Everything else feels frumpy in comparison, as it did in Coda.
All that being said, the good stories far outweigh the bad.
After the Funeral is a collection that sees Hadley in very familiar contextual settings to her novel Free Love. Many of these short stories are set in the 1970s and celebrate women confused by the times. I argue that Hadley is most comfortable here, in the past.
The titular short story, After the Funeral, is a vivid picture of a widowed mother of two daughters wade through the 1970s by herself. In one of my favourites, Funny Little Snake, the protagonist is sending a telegram. It must be in and around this decade that Hadley can perfect her formula. Very often, the central character is a distracted, elegant mother, or mother-figure, who can’t work out just how she lost control of her life.
Also featured are the hapless children, discarded by their mother, searching for connection in other avenues. Usually, I don’t like ready stories that feature a child prominently – I find them infantile and unrelatable – I put Room by Emma Donoghue down in disgust after about ten pages – but Hadley gets the better of me. I think it’s because she writes them from a distance, often observed by an outsider to the family. Funny Little Snake is from the perspective of Valerie, who delivers her older lover’s daughter (Robyn) back to his ex-wife, Marise. Marise is described to have the beauty, and motherly ambivalence, of a decaying aristocrat. There’s this picture-perfect scene that could have been delivered, deadpan, by Rosamund Pike’s matriarch in Saltburn.
The Bloody Marys when they came were strong, made with lots of Tabasco and ice and lemon and a stuffed olive on a stick. Marise said they were wonderfully nourishing, she lived on them. She even brought one – made without vodka, or only the tiniest teaspoon – for Robyn, along with a packet of salted crisps. Kissing her, she pretended to gobble her up; Robyn submitted to the assault. –You’re lucky, I saved those for you specially, I know that little girls are hungry bears. Are you still my hungry bear, Bobbin?
Robyn went unexpectedly then into a bear performance, hunching her shoulders, crossing her eyes, snuffling and panting, scrabbling in the air with her hands curled up like paws, her face a blunt little snout showing pointed teeth. They must have played this game before; Marise watched her daughter with distaste and pity, austere as a pillar in her white dress, fearsome and handsome as a carved ship’s figurehead. For a moment Robyn really was a small, dull-furred brown bear, dancing joylessly to order. Valerie wouldn’t have guessed that the child had it in her, to enter like this so completely into some other life than her own. –Nice old bear, she said encouragingly.
–That’s quite enough of that, Bobby, Marise said. –Most unsettling.
Sometimes I wish Hadley had been born closer to my age. It would be nice to have her alongside us in the modern day, rather than always looking back.
Leave a Reply