Like her earlier novel The Past (2015), Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day narrates the fortunes of a quartet of middle-class bed-hoppers; this group is older but no wiser than its predecessor. Other people hover at the edges of the two novels; however, the foursome is the basic unit at the heart of both works, whether it’s two couples (Late in the Day) or four siblings (The Past). Sexual infidelity may be the order of the day, but more attention is paid to the sheets, towels, jewellery and discarded garments than to what anyone might be getting up to in bed.
The Past has a first section devoted to the present, a second section that goes back in time, and a final section that returns to the present. Late in the Day switches freely back and forth across a few decades, encompassing the period in which one member of the quartet, Zachary, was still alive as well as the aftermath of his sudden death. Most people in this universe, whatever they do and however ugly things become, consider themselves benign, intelligent, complex and progressive. People learn to cope with loss, inflicting fresh damage in the process.
Alice, one of the siblings in The Past, tries to re-animate the dead by reading aloud some letters from her brother to their late mother without his permission. At the level of plot, she is endeavouring to do what the novelist, rather than the character, is free to undertake: the mother that Alice has lost forever is magically restored to us readers as a speaking, living being when the middle section of the book zips backwards and tells the story of a previous generation. These structural games show us a writer who enjoys her capacity to manipulate history while dwelling on the frustrated attempts of her characters to do the same.
Philip Larkin, a novelist as well as a poet, wrote to Monica Jones in 1953: “I do love the past. Anything more than 20 years back begins to breathe a luminous fascination for me: it starts my imagination working. Why? Because it is past, I suppose, & leaves my feelings free to get to work on it.”
Like a lexicographer for whom dead languages are the best because they can no longer mutate, a fiction writer can be liberated by past events; he or she can “get to work” on material no longer subject to change. Compare Larkin’s authorial response to the past with what Hadley’s Christine, an artist herself, has to say on the subject in Late in the Day. She is conversing with Zachary about the Tiepolo ceiling in the Scuola dei Carmini in Venice:
— I love the past, she said.
— Oh yes, me too, the past.
— But I mean it, I’m serious, listen. Sometimes these days I almost think I can do without the present. The past is enough for me, it’s enough for my life. Does that sound insane? I could only say it to you… I’m not saying that the past was good… or fair, or better, or anything. But nothing will ever be more beautiful than this, will it? It’s surpassingly beautiful. It surpasses anything I could have imagined. It fulfils me, it’s enough for me.
Christine’s love of the past, unlike Larkin’s, seems oddly dead-end. Admittedly, hers is not a settled conviction, but rather born of a moment which will shortly see her demonstrate a great deal of appetite for pleasures of the here and now. Still, her sentiments don’t feel interesting or complex. I don’t think she is meant to be a contemptible person—everyone in the book has good and bad sides, but Christine’s is the consciousness given the most sustained attention. The trouble is that she doesn’t amount to enough to deserve it. In Hadley’s third-person, closely observed but hands-off fiction, people aren’t only types or talking heads, but they aren’t quite plausible as individuals either.
Or perhaps it’s truer to say that they aren’t individuals who repay attention to their insides so much as to their outsides. Their intimacies and identifying features are physical: items of clothing, hairstyles, trinkets, ways of speaking and eating, drinking and driving. (Hadley is very good on how awful people can be in and about cars.) Such moments or qualities are in many novelists’ hands the sparky, sudden clues to otherwise hidden aspects of their characters’ thoughts and feelings. But in Hadley something isn’t quite right about the balance of detachment with engagement.
There are many highly accomplished aspects to her style and management of sentences and episodes; she conjures up domestic interiors, from scuzzy student bedsits to posh and artfully scuffed living rooms, with deft and convincing economy. But the people who move through these spaces seem less compelling and oddly less mobile than the “real solid things” that surround them.
Over the past 15 years, she has published seven novels and three collections of short stories. Her work is often described as “reassuring” and hailed for giving pleasure to her readers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Perhaps because her own instinct is to play it safe, she admires quite different impulses in others. Reviewing Ellen Gilchrist in the Times Literary Supplement, for instance, Hadley praises her as “a wonderfully reckless writer of recklessness—it is there in the hurrying, hungry, forward movement of her sentences.” In an interview, she comments of Natalia Ginzburg that “there’s an almost dangerous openness in her writing—always something at risk in her sentences, something unknown waiting to be uncovered in the next line.”
The admiration for something “almost dangerous” shows us a writer who is hedging her bets, not quite prepared to say “dangerous” outright. Previous reviewers of her novels have sometimes expressed mild frustration that she won’t harness her gifts for stylistic and observational precision to a bigger, less stable wagon.
*** In The Past, Alice finds comfort in reading “when you knew in advance everything that had to happen.” While it can’t be said of Hadley’s novels that every episode is anticipated, we know the kind of territory we’re in and the outlines of the actors are very soon made very clear indeed. Some readers will like this more than others. Andrew Motion, reviewing Late in the Day for the Guardian, observed of its characters that they possess “a certain feeling of stasis, as though each one is so definitely fixed in the mind of their creator, they are incapable of surprising her by escaping her control. This feels all the more striking since all their stories are in various ways concerned with change and fluctuation.” Maybe this pairing of stasis with fluctuation is the whole point: Hadley’s people themselves feel trapped by versions of themselves they did not realise they had grown into, or they are snared by their friends’ and lovers’ perceptions, suddenly made plain to them in moments of disaster and in the course of drunken arguments. Or is this atmosphere of entrapment rather the result of their author having learned too successfully to manipulate them?
Hadley has recalled in an interview that “my mother told me not to be too nice—I think she meant writing, not living, though who knows. That was a liberating idea. I had been trying too hard to please my characters, I think. I hadn’t pushed them around with the necessary authority.” The comment suggests an element of competition and potentially aggressive subordination in the writer’s relationship to her inventions.
Franz Kafka reported the vivid sense, while composing his novel The Man Who Disappeared, that two characters he had decided to leave out of the book then turned on him, pummelling him as he wrote and proving in every way to be more alluring and more realistic than characters who had made the cut. That kind of uncertainty, the sense of an author not having been quite fair in his or her principles of selection or distribution of attention, is often what makes a novel come to life. For fictional people to be dynamic and three-dimensional, we need to feel as if some of them at least might not be entirely pliable to their creator’s will, or might not be all they seem—but such a suspicion is never allowed to gather around the members of Hadley’s well-ordered, crisply defined cast.
Affinities with Austen, Larkin and Barbara Pym are discernible in her work, but Hadley lacks their sense of comedy. The po-faced clever-clever discussions that her characters rehearse, which sometimes involve novels akin to the ones in which they appear, lack plausibility. Has anyone, in truth, ever said anything like this while chatting to an old friend? “Because in the visual arts, you know, it’s occurred to me that women have been exempted from certain forms of self-doubt, which might be gendered.”
Admittedly, the speaker owns an art gallery in London—but even so. Other discussions of art and fiction in Hadley’s work seem to mark the author’s excessive timidity. If she has something to say about the value of novels such as the one she is writing, why not come out and say it in the narratorial voice? It does no good to make characters mouthpieces for authorial opinions. A couple of Hadley’s women have to be turned into on-off Eng Lit PhD students in order to justify the otherwise unlikely, stilted thoughts they have about books. (From Accidents in the Home: “In literature though, Clare thought, there is a notorious problem with heavenly peace”; her thesis is about George Sand.)
Representations of prose’s sister arts often feature in Hadley’s fiction, especially of poetry and painting (the poets are generally failures). The end of Late in the Day is so overt a re-make of To the Lighthouse as to seem pastiche, except that it isn’t obviously meant to be comic. While Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe quietly rejoices in completing her painting, and lays down her brush with the author of her story, Hadley’s Christine brushes her fingers across a fresh sheet of paper as the story closes: “she thought that now at least she had made the first mark.” Where the writer ends, the painter begins. “I have had my vision,” thinks Lily Briscoe to herself. Or, as we learn of Clare in Accidents in the Home: “She had had her swim.”
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley is published by Jonathan Cape, £16.99
