11/23/2015
Not much happens in this sixth novel from Hadley (Clever Girl), yet even its most quotidian events seem bathed in meaning and consequence. Set exclusively on the rambling grounds of a crumbling English cottage estate, the story follows four middle-aged siblings as they putter about their deceased grandparents’ home for three weeks, deciding whether or not to sell it. Split into three acts—two bookends that take place in the present, and one middle section that flashes back to their dead mother’s brief return to the cottage during a tumultuous time in her marriage—the book has the feeling of a disjointed structure. But like her previous works, it’s Hadley’s ability to probe the quirks of her characters’ psyches that makes this novel exceptional. Whether it’s the vain second-youngest sibling, Alice, and her habit of overcompensating for her brother’s and sisters’ inadequacies, or the introverted oldest sibling Hettie, and her secret obsession with her stuffy brother, Roland, and his sophisticated Argentinian wife (his third), Hadley has a knack for exposing each character’s most pressing vulnerabilities. Of special note are the scenes involving the teenagers at the house—Roland’s 16-year-old daughter, Molly, and Alice’s ex-boyfriend’s college-age son, Kasim. The lovebirds’ blooming infatuation with each other is palpable and awkward; it recalls the epic nature of falling helplessly, giddily in love for the first time. This is familial drama at its best—unabashedly ordinary yet undoubtedly captivating. (Jan.)
Beautiful.
A novel so evocative of summer and adolescence that to read it is to reexperience the deep languor and longing of those days…. We come to understand that the past... is merely yesterday’s present.... It is that revelation that elevates the novel, deepening our own understanding of what shapes us.
Hadley’s prose is descriptively rich. She elevates the mundane via her keen understanding go people and the emotional complexities of marriages and families—secrets, subtle deceptions and loyalties.
Exquisite…. For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures. Like those North American masters of the domestic realm, Hadley crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural.... Extraordinary.
Hadley brings a keen intelligence and emotional acuity to domestic fiction…. The Past glitters.
I finished “The Past’’ sadly — why did it have to end? — with a sense that I had understood something profound about both Hadley’s characters, and my own life. Many readers will, I suspect, in the presence of this exhilarating novel feel the same.
Hadley glides like a familiar spirit through the rooms of the house and the perspectives of her characters…. Her novels have a moral spaciousness that gives their ordinary settings and conflicts a philosophical range.... “The Past” shows Ms. Hadley’s gifts in fine fettle.
Chekhovian by way of a modern-day British pastoral…. Hadley moves deftly back and forth between eras and generations…. As in Chekhov’s dramas, The Past is a stage on which nothing much happens, brilliantly, even as everything slowly disintegrates.
Hadley’s formidable storytelling talent and compassionate understanding of humanity pull us right into this beautifully told narrative…. A memorable novel that continues to resonate well after the reader has turned the last page, and makes us long for the next work of fiction by this outstanding English writer.
Hadley’s beautifully composed new novel... recalls Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris in its dovetailing story lines, but the author’s genius for the thorny comforts of family... are entirely her own.
Each player... is so distinct, so warmly dimensional you soon feel you know them as well as they know each other. This alone... is a marvel. More marvelous still is Hadley’s seamless, steady control, moving individual and collective stories forward and backward in time — a splendid work.
I find Tessa Hadley’s work genuinely helpful, especially when it comes to the big subjects: love and marriage, the political versus the personal, children, friendship. And then there are the sentences themselves, so precise and beautiful, often sly, sometimes devastating, always expertly paced. Few writers give me such consistent pleasure.
Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts.
Hadley should be a bestseller rather than literary fiction’s best kept secret…. [She] is an exquisite writer, a writer’s writer, with a fine eye for detail and a way of crafting sentences that stop and make you inhale.
Tessa Hadley has become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them.
A novel of delicious readability that reaffirms its author’s reputation—Hadley is regularly and deservedly compared to Henry James and Alice Munro. She’s thrillingly perceptive and deeply sympathetic, and also a supreme craftsman…. An extremely affecting novel of cumulative richness.
[An] expertly wrought depiction of family life. Hadley’s arresting descriptions of the physical and emotional landscape, and her tender approach to love, lust and, crucially, the passing of time underline her reputation as one of the UK’s finest contemporary novelists.
Masterly….When it comes to domestic drama Hadley is without rival, and here her considerable talent is poured into an astonishingly astute grasp of ‘the sheer irritation and perplexity of family coexistence’.
Masterful.
A new Tessa Hadley novel is a pleasure to be savoured. In her five novels and two collections of stories, Hadley has matched the psychological insight of Henry James with the sharp dialogue of Elizabeth Bowen.... A hugely enjoyable and keenly intelligent novel, brimming with the vitality of unruly desire.
An immaculate prose stylist.
A British writer whose work probes the dangers and joys of family life, Tessa Hadley writes like a dream, even if some of her stories can haunt you like a nightmare….Hadley’s measured, perfectly controlled prose masterfully chronicles her characters’ turmoil; these stories are gemlike and unforgettable.
Hadley glides like a familiar spirit through the rooms of the house and the perspectives of her characters…. Her novels have a moral spaciousness that gives their ordinary settings and conflicts a philosophical range.... “The Past” shows Ms. Hadley’s gifts in fine fettle.
Exquisite…. For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures. Like those North American masters of the domestic realm, Hadley crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural.... Extraordinary.
Deliciously precise.... Built in a Chekhovian manner, handily assembling the grown members of an extended family and their offspring under one roof.... Hadley is adept at delineating the Cranes’ brand of cultured middle-class Britishness in all its generational mutations.
From the coziest and most familiar of fictional materials, Hadley has created a remarkable story as disturbing as it is diverting.
Hadley is so insightful, such a lovely writer, that she pulls you right into the tangle of wires that connect and trip up the stressed siblings. She makes you feel for these imperfect people, want to scold them, and ultimately accept them as they are. Just like family.
Each player... is so distinct, so warmly dimensional you soon feel you know them as well as they know each other. This alone... is a marvel. More marvelous still is Hadley’s seamless, steady control, moving individual and collective stories forward and backward in time - a splendid work.
Hadley is so perceptive… that it can feel like she’s revealing little secrets about life that it would have taken you years to notice on your own. A-
Splendid…. Hadley’s gift for depicting the interior lives of children and adults rivals Ian McEwans’s in the aptly lauded first section of Atonement.
A novel so evocative of summer and adolescence that to read it is to reexperience the deep languor and longing of those days…. We come to understand that the past... is merely yesterday’s present.... It is that revelation that elevates the novel, deepening our own understanding of what shapes us.
Hadley brings a keen intelligence and emotional acuity to domestic fiction…. The Past glitters.
Chekhovian by way of a modern-day British pastoral…. Hadley moves deftly back and forth between eras and generations…. As in Chekhov’s dramas, The Past is a stage on which nothing much happens, brilliantly, even as everything slowly disintegrates.
I finished ‘The Past’ sadly — why did it have to end? — with a sense that I had understood something profound about both Hadley’s characters, and my own life. Many readers will, I suspect, in the presence of this exhilarating novel feel the same.
No one writes family like Hadley.
Hadley’s formidable storytelling talent and compassionate understanding of humanity pull us right into this beautifully told narrative…. A memorable novel that continues to resonate well after the reader has turned the last page, and makes us long for the next work of fiction by this outstanding English writer.
A fresh take on a familiar story of fractious family reunions where old resentments resurface, new alliances form, and long-buried secrets are uncovered. A great read whether at the cottage or just dreaming of one.
Hadley’s prose is descriptively rich. She elevates the mundane via her keen understanding go people and the emotional complexities of marriages and families—secrets, subtle deceptions and loyalties.
Placing fraught family relationships under the microscope, Hadley, wise and discerning, offers a subtle-yet-bold examination of complex emotional subtexts that have the power to bring kin together or destroy the bonds that would otherwise unite them.
Universal in its appeal and its intuitive ways of revealing how human nature, even our own, can surprise us…. Readers…should prepare themselves…for the beautiful cadences of Hadley’s descriptive, lyrical prose.
Hadley’s novel is the kind of observant, bittersweet book whose pleasures defy plot summaries....With Hadley’s wry insights and gorgeous sentences, readers, like Alice, will find themselves only too happy to be enfolded by ‘The Past.’
[An] exquisitely written family drama.
Exquisite…. For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures. Like those North American masters of the domestic realm, Hadley crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural.... Extraordinary.
Beautifully written.
Few writers have been as important to me as Tessa Hadley. She puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master, and The Past is a big, brilliant novel: sensual, wise, compelling—and utterly magnificent.
Placing fraught family relationships under the microscope, Hadley, wise and discerning, offers a subtle-yet-bold examination of complex emotional subtexts that have the power to bring kin together or destroy the bonds that would otherwise unite them.
★ 2015-10-15
Four middle-aged siblings reunite at their family home in the English countryside in Hadley's (Clever Girl, 2014, etc.) quietly masterful domestic portrait. They arrive one by one, gathering at the decrepit old house for what may be the last time (memories are one thing; the cost of maintenance is another): Alice first, artistic and sentimental; Fran, frazzled and practical, her two children in tow and her touring musician husband frustratingly absent; Harriet, the eldest, self-contained and dignified; and Roland, the only brother, distant and academic, newly married (for the third time) to an Argentinian lawyer the sisters have yet to meet. When he arrives with his new wife and 16-year-old daughter, Molly, the family is complete, plus one: Alice has brought her ex-boyfriend's college-aged son, Kasim, along, too. Nothing much "happens" in the novel or, at least, not outwardly. The siblings drink tea, they drink gin, they bicker; they mind Fran's children, Ivy and Arthur, watch romance bloom between Molly and Kasim, and allow the question that has brought them together—will they sell the house?—to be buried under the business of family vacationing: food preparation, child care, swimming. But inwardly, the sisters are in near-constant upheaval. Hadley expertly captures the gentle tragedies of living, losses, and regrets that are at once momentous and too quotidian to mention: aging, the passage of time, the fissures and slights and unspoken disappointments that simmer underneath the surfaces of all families. The melancholy drama here is not external but internal; not in facts or in actions but in thoughts. Broken up into three dreamy sections—two in the present and one set in the same house a generation earlier—the novel might seem overly precious if it weren't so bracingly precise. Hadley is the patron saint of ordinary lives; her trademark empathy and sharp insight are out in force here.
