“All the books I have written deal with characters placed deliberately under enormous duress in order to see of what they are made.” This quote from the great Toni Morrison is one definition of good fiction – stories that chart how a character behaves when they’re in trouble, the choices they make in the moment that can have lasting consequences over time. It’s a fitting description of the style of Tessa Hadley, the English author who published her first novel in her 40s, before going on to publish seven further novels and three collections to widespread acclaim.
Hadley has won the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She contributes regularly to the New Yorker and reviews for the Guardian and the London Review of Books. The 12 stories in her new collection, After the Funeral, have all been published before, seven of them in the New Yorker, which gives some indication of their quality. From the bracing, panoramic opening story that gives the collection its name, to the finely observed Coda, set in the midst of the pandemic, the standard is consistently strong.
Hadley switches narrative modes with grace, first person to third, past to present, each one suiting the individual story
Hadley’s worlds are middle class, often middle England, with the focus on female characters. Wives, second wives, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters, mistresses all feature at various points. The backdrop rarely shifts from the domestic milieu yet each of the stories feels unique, intriguing, delightfully gossipy in tone but trenchantly literary in style.
Hadley has correctly been compared to Alice Munro, but the stories in After the Funeral, a number of which are set in mid- to late-20th-century Britain, have more in common with the work of writers such as Elizabeth Jane Howard and Elizabeth Taylor. All three are interested in consequences, the long reach and legacy of actions. They write with a killer mix of humanity, compassion and a splinter of ice. Or as Angela, the novelist mother of a disgruntled teen in Cecilia Awakened, puts it: “Writing her novels was like clairvoyance sometimes, and involved this same intense sympathy, alongside insights that were more ruthless.”
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The feeling of range in Hadley’s stories comes partly from the absorbing scenarios – estranged sisters encountering one another after decades across the lobby of a hotel; a married man killed in a car accident with his lover; a commune wedding that goes wrong – and partly from the author’s way with structure. There’s no set formula, rather stories that offer slivers of enlightenment, confusion, loss, disenchantment, an occasional twist that feels earned. Hadley switches narrative modes with similar grace, first person to third, past to present, each one suiting the individual story.
Certain themes recur: philandering husbands, put-upon wives, damaged children. Funny Little Snake, where a young second wife takes pity on her husband’s daughter, is an astute study of neglect: “The room was cold and cheerless though, and there were no sheets on the bare mattress, only a dirty yellow nylon sleeping bag.” The deceased father in After the Funeral is an airline pilot barely known to his two young children: “He’d brought them costume dolls for their collection, from all over the world.” In The Other One, a divorced mother of two, Heloise, is sifting through the past for answers to her unhappy present, questioning the hedonistic hippie household of her childhood: “She knew other children of those brilliant, risky marriages of the nineteen seventies who were taciturn and full of doubt like her.”
These characters live and grow on the page; they frequently surprise with their actions and their awakenings
Throughout the collection, Hadley is generous with character descriptions. Nothing is rushed. A relation who turns up on the scrounge is “a poisonous puffball in a mushroom-coloured trouser suit; the cousin was wispy, with dyed yellow hair and an earring and sky blue nylon flares”. Lynette, the narrator of the poignant Dido’s Lament, is “tall, anxious, distinctive, in her late thirties, with coffee-coloured freckled skin”. These characters live and grow on the page; they frequently surprise with their actions and their awakenings. Lynette leaves her ex’s home thinking about his solid life of tangible assets and offspring, “whereas her own complexity seemed to have had no consequences, it was all wrapped up inside her, she didn’t own anything significant to speak of, she had nothing to show for it”. In My Mother’s Wedding, meanwhile, a sensible, shy daughter may have more of her mother in her than she realises.
Above all, these are stories that leave the reader the wiser for having read them, stories to learn from and live by, populated by characters that feel unerringly real: “I knew what must become of these characters,” says the narrator of Coda, “and yet I felt their jeopardy on the page just as if they were free, making up their lives as they went along, hesitating over choosing this path rather than that one.”
