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Book Reviewed by:A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships.
In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie's own age—everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.
As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley's celebrated body of work, After the Funeral and Other Stories bears out Claire Messud's observation that "Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley has the gift of making small canvases inexhaustibly new...Compassionate and luminous, Hadley sees them all—or should I say, she sees us all: our travails, our fantasies and our small joys."
After the Funeral
After the funeral, the two little girls, aged nine and seven, accompanied their grief-stricken mother home. Naturally they were grief-stricken also; but then again, they hadn't known their father very well, and hadn't enormously liked him. He was an airline pilot, and they'd preferred it when he was away working; being alert little girls, they'd picked up intimations that he preferred it too. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when air travel was still supposed to be glamorous. Philip Lyons had flown 747s across the Atlantic for BOAC, until he died of a heart attack—luckily not while he was in the air but on the ground, prosaically eating breakfast in a New York hotel room. The airline had flown him home free of charge.
All the girls' concentration was on their mother, Marlene, who couldn't cope. Throughout the funeral service she didn't even cry; she was numb, huddled in her black Persian-lamb coat, petite and soft and pretty in dark glasses, with muzzy ...
Tessa Hadley has made a name for herself with a beautifully subtle style and deep insights into what makes relationships strain and sometimes break. Her work is unshowy yet quietly brilliant...continued
Full Review
(684 words)
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Tessa Hadley, author of After the Funeral and Other Stories, did not have a book published until age 46. In interviews, she has been frank about the fact that her first four or five novels, written in her twenties and long since discarded, didn't measure up. "I am so glad I didn't publish a debut novel at 25, because [the books] were dead. I would have loved it at the time, but they were terrible," she said in 2022. She told the Los Angeles Review of Books, "I was a slow developer and … didn't have a strong, forceful sense of who I was and what my authority was and what I had to say. That took a long time to grow, and I came into it late, and now I don't regret that. I'm almost glad that I had that 20 years of trying and failing &...
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