"Clever Girl" by Tessa Hadley

An audio book.

Stella (1st person PoV) was born in 1956. We don't know from what year she's looking back. Her father left when she was 18 months (Stella thought he'd died).

She grew up in Bristol. When she was 8 her cousin was killed by her uncle. In court there was a hint that sexual frustration was a factor. In those days, domestic violence was sometimes considered as an expected, private activity, like sex. The change of sexual politics over the years is a theme.

Her stepfather grew up in an orphanage. When she was 15 she had a rather older boyfriend, Val (Valentino) who read Beckett. They had sex twice. She found that he was having an affair with a male teacher, Fred. At 18, in 1974, she had Val's baby, Luke. She didn't tell Val, who'd moved to the States. She became a housemaid at a private school, then ended up living with Fred for years, as a housekeeper.

She seeks her biological father, finds a driving instructor of that name, takes driving lessons to see if he's her father. He isn't.

She stays in a commune (shared house) for a while, gets pregnant again. Nicky, the presumed father, is knifed a few weeks before the birth. The child, Rohin, went to live with Nicky's mother when he was 16.

She meets Mac - married, rich and 20 years older than her - "Because he wasn't my type, I had fallen for him too fast and too deep, with no markers to signal any way back." Her friend says "She's something about him. He was nice." It's not a convincing affair, but maybe she doesn't have much choice. They break up. At 30 she does A levels in a year, then gets a good English degree. She plans to be an academic. She's living with Fred. When he returns to his wife, Stella stays with a friend from the commune days. She decides to be an OT. Mac's wife leaves him. Mac contacts Stella and they marry. Even while she was with Fred she sometimes ran away, giving little or no notice. She needed a break. She takes Mac's car keys, not intending to return, then recklessly gets on one of their horses, loses the keys.

Sheila, from commune days, stays with them for a few weeks with her baby. She asks Stella to foster the baby. Mac is keen to. He retires, becomes an avid gardener. It ends in 2006, when she is a married woman of 50 with three children. Her father tries to contact her. Val returns. She visits him but doesn't tell him about Luke, nor Luke about Val.

I've not been too impressed with her short stories, but I liked at least the first half of this. I didn't realise that some of the chapters were short stories until I read the reviews. Observation is often followed by analysis, and sometimes by analysis in the context of her later life. There's so much incidental observation that it sounds like autobiography. There's much convincing period detail - kids are freaked out by "veins in school dinner liver". Chance events dictate her life - there are coincidences (e.g. South American connections)

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway (She makes one believe every word of Stella's story. But to feel engaged, to need to read on, you want to feel Stella could be a friend. I believed in her but could not warm to her. Other readers may fare better. For me, the book was a random encounter accelerating into unwelcome intimacy. One of the things that makes Stella hard to like is that, although we become intimate with the details of her life, she seems always to be partly unavailable as a character or withheld.)
• Elaine Showalter (three [chapters] were published as short stories in the New Yorker. ... So far, about two-thirds of the way through, the story of a clever girl seems coherent. Even if some themes in the early chapters fade away (for example, the pagan tree cult she invents with her best friend at school), Stella seems like a knowable character. ... And then Hadley introduces an unexpected shift: Stella quite suddenly decides she does not want to study literature, let alone get a PhD. ... Instead she becomes an occupational therapist. this last-minute switch seems arbitrary, capricious and unproductive. It might be justified if occupational therapy led Stella to self-discovery or a sense of fulfilment, but instead it seems to negate or undermine her literary past. That abrupt shift is the major reason Clever Girl doesn't add up.)

"Bad dreams" by Tessa Hadley (Vintage, 2017)

Stories from New Yorker (7), Prospect etc.

The prose is matter-of-fact - no fuss, no beautiful sentences. She's happy to tell rather than show, so she can get on with the story. Here's an example

Edith was thirty-four and lively and not bad-looking and had always expected to get married, but humiliatingly she had to own up to Fitz that this was her first experience of love - certainly of what she shyly called 'intimate relations'. Fitz was the most intelligent man Edith had ever got anywhere close to; his dry humour and his good taste, and his appreciation of her, changed her life as drastically as if she found footprints on an island where she'd been beginning to believe she was alone. (p.59)

She's prepared to dip out of the prevailing PoV for a paragraph to make a point, even if it only a little point - e.g. "yet he was aware of the girl standing somewhere upstairs" (p.19) in a mostly Jane-PoV piece, or "This different music rolled and rippled up and down the notes, joyous and mournful, lingering and delaying, holding back with painful sweetness" (p.74) where we see things through a young girl's eyes. On p.118 "the child paddled her toes in the hair of the white goatskin rug. Gleaming, uncanny, half reverted to its animal past, the rug yearned to the moon, which was balanced on the top of the wall at the back of the paved yard".

In "One Saturday Morning" there's a "Chekhov's Gun" rude letter and then the narrator (a young girl) sees her mother with another man. The connection is made for us - "She pictured herself making a joke at breakfast the next day about her mother dancing on the balcony with Don Smith, and then she knew she mustn't, and grew hot with the memory of the rude letter, her wrong judgement of what was funny and what was shaming" (p.84).

In several of the stories, the main character, alone, has the chance to explore a room or house - often one they knew. Marina explores the old man's big house that she used to pass as a child, Laura is house-sitting and exploring attics, a little girl explores her house in the middle of the night, Claire re-explores the house where she grew up when the rest are in bed, etc. The characters - in childhood, recovering from a separation, or having had a medical diagnosis - are perhaps symbolically re-evaluating their body or past.

The women like to feel they're in control of situations. It can become a game - "Sally was trying her power on this boy" (p.215)

She's a much admired writer, but she hits my blindspot. Pieces like "Deeds not words" do little for me. "Silk Brocade" involves a time-jump - 1953 to 1972 - with a tidy plot, the correspondences diagramable. "Flight" is my favourite story. I grew to like "Under the sign of the moon" too, though the dream was too convenient. "An Abduction" is beginning to grow on me. Here are some plot notes

• An Abduction - Jane Allsop gets a lift from a car of boys to one of their homes. She loses her virginity there to Daniel, who spends the rest of the night with Fiona, Nigel's sister (the house belongs to Fiona and Nigel's parents). She explores the house. At the end we jump to Jane's divorce in her mid-fifties, and hear how Daniel settled down.
• The Stain - Marina cares for an old man - "She told him that she had been looking at this house all her life ... When she went up to dust the bedrooms on the second floor, which were never used, she liked to stand dreaming, looking down from the windows on her old life in the street below". Wendy, the man's daughter, visits most days. He leaves the house to Marina in his will. She turns it down, which angers her husband.
• Deeds not words - Miss Mulhouse, a suffragette, is a heroine at the school where she's a teacher. Colleagues Edith and Fitz have an affair - Edith's form of liberation. Fitz is married. He goes off to war.
• One Saturday morning - Carrie, 10, is alone in the house when a family friend Dom arrives. When her parents return Dom tells them that her wife's died. Later, Carrie sees Dom kiss her mother at a party.
• Experience - Freshly divorced, Laura house-sits for Hana, explores the personal items (diaries, keepsakes) in the attic, goes out with the house-owner ex.
• Bad Dreams - A child wakes up in the dark, wanders in the flat, turns chairs upside down, goes back to sleep. Next morning her mother thinks her father had a fit of anger
• Flight - Claire returns from Philadelphia to the UK for work ("Her role was in cultivating their long-term relationships with the manufacturers who used these instruments; she had to coax people into doing what she knew would work best for them", p.138), pops in to see her family in Leeds unannounced. Her sister Susan, who'd nursed their parents through their final illnesses, refuses to talk to her (Compare with "Breathe" from Mark Haddon's "The Pier Falls" collection (2017)).
• Under the sign of the moon - Greta, 60 has survived a cancer scare. She takes a train to Liverpool to see her daughter Kate, meeting a much younger (though rather strange) man on the train who seems interested in her. She turns him down. Greta compares her alternative lifestyle in her 20s with that of her daughter.
• Her share of sorrow - Ruby, a rather plain, untalented girl in a pretty, talented family, starts writing a novel to the delight of her parents, but shows it to no one. When her brother finds it, he discovers it's a tacky Romance. Ruby completes the novel, killing off everybody except Lady Carole
• Silk Brocade - Ann and Kit make expensive wedding dresses. One day an old, dumpy schoolmate drops in, asking for a dress. She had nursed a rich man to health and was marrying him. Ann, Kit and boyfriends visit her new, big house to collect material. The groom-to-be suddenly dies. With the material Ann makes a jacket that years later her daughter leaves at the house while visiting.

Other reviews

• KJ Orr (This is writing of great nuance and psychological acuity. In these stories – predominantly concerning girls and women, with settings ranging from the present day to early last century – thresholds are crossed, the familiar is thrown off. ... One of Hadley’s striking achievements in this collection is setting up a tension between life lived moment by moment, “closely as a skin”, and events viewed from the outside, from positions of separation – of exile, dislocation or dispossession. ... Bad Dreams is remarkable not only for Hadley’s penetrating engagement with her subject matter, but for her extraordinary and distinctive range.)
• Helen McAlpin (Her meticulously observed, extraordinarily perceptive stories are as satisfying as Alice Munro's. Yes, Hadley is that good. ... "Abduction," a standout in a book of standouts)
• Claire Jarvis (The impossibility of forgetting something bad once you have known it runs like a current through these peculiar stories.)
• Leah Hager Cohen (Hadley’s spell — and she is a spellbinding writer — derives its power from the way she keeps the uncanny almost precisely counterbalanced with the commonplace. No, that’s wrong: It’s the way she discloses the uncanny within all that is commonplace. Ever so deftly, ever so coolly, she flips over the surface and gives us a glimpse of the repellent or the beguiling or, more often, the repellent-beguiling thing underneath. ... These pages are rife with finely jarring details and apparently minor trespasses that turn out to reverberate. ... the title story, a small masterpiece)
• Sara Cutaia (A few stories are less memorable, such as “Deeds Not Words,” where an all-girls school deals with the women’s suffrage movement tangentially through a character who is preoccupied with her own love affair — full of potential but not executed to fruition. And though I enjoyed “One Saturday Morning” for its childlike perspective, the front half, full of self-contained observations, didn’t engage me; the shocker came twelve pages too late. Perhaps the only weak point in the collection are the stories’ final pages — sometimes abrupt, sometimes trying too hard for ambiguity.)

"Sunstroke" by Tessa Hadley (Vintage, 2008)

She's been published in "Granta" and "The New Yorker", which surprizes me. The reviews quoted on the back cover mention "understated", "discreet", "excels in glimpses". The quote on the front cover begins "Really very sexy". Take your pick. In two stories older women flirt (or more) with younger men (aged 13 and 18). The 13 year old tracks the woman down over 2 decades later, meeting token resistance. A 20 year gap occurs in at least 3 of the stories - on both p.69 and p.127 events that meant so much to one person are barely recalled by another. Towards the end of the final story there is "Forty years later". Such intervals give the author the opportunity to interpret previous events for the reader, to summarize - "When Nia was in her twenties she went through (as she sees it now) a drearily dogmatic feminist phase. She lived for a while as a lesbian, and camped at Greenham Common. She gave herself a new name because she didn't want to use her father's, and then when Phil died (suddenly, so that she never said goodbye to him) she went into a depression for two years, and only came out of it with the help of therapy. Now she works as a therapist herself, and has a steady relationship with a man" (p.150).

She does other time-shifts too - in "Buckets of Blood" the final section begins with a jump of a few weeks, but before the paragraph's finished we're back to the original timeline. And she switches PoV - in "Sunstroke" there's a paragraph-long change of PoV. More than halfway through "Matrilineal" a child wakes before her mother, and takes over the PoV.

Other reviews

• Anne Enright (Guardian)
• Liesl Schillinger (New York Times)
• Patrick Gale (Independent)
• Lakshmi Swami