"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.)