Clever Girl
Tessa Hadley, 2014
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062270399
Summary
Like Alice Munro and Colm Toibin, Tessa Hadley possesses the remarkable ability to transform the mundane into the sublime—an eye for the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives that elevates domestic fiction to literary art.
In Clever Girl, she offers the indelible story of one woman's life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today.
Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an Englishwoman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley's involving and moving novel follows Stella from childhood, growing up with her single mother in a Bristol bedsit, into the murky waters of middle age.
It is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama—violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley's observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles, pressing us to exclaim with each page, Yes, this is how it is. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 28, 1956
• Where—Bristol, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University
• Currently—lives in London, England
Tessa Hadley is a British author born and raised in Bristol, England. Her father was a teacher who loved jazz, and her mother, a homemaker who loved painting. Her family was not devoid of literary chops: Hadley's uncle is the noted London playwright Peter Nichols.
As a girl, Tessa read extensively. She studied literature at Cambridge, which she found a "chilly, funny, odd place. Nursing idealistic dreams of changing lives, she decided to become a teacher.
It was a complete disaster. I was 23. I went to a rough comprehensive. I was political: I wanted to bring light where there was darkness. All that rubbish. I was hopeless. The kids ran rings around me. I cried on my way to school every morning.
Her misfortunes as a teacher sapped Hadley of her confidence to become an author. Additionally, two other major life events took over: marriage and children. Having attempted a book early on, it took another 23 years, plus three children and three stepchildren, before publishing her first novel in 2002. That book, Accidents in the Home, was longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award.
In addition to six novels (see below) she has two volumes of short stories, both of which were New York Times Notable Books. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker.
Hadley lives in London.
Books
2002 - Accidents in the Home
2003 - Everything Will Be All Right
2007 - The Master Bedroom
2007 - Sunstroke: and Other Stories
2011 - The London Train
2012 - Married Love: and Other Stories
2013 - Clever Girl
2016 - The Past
2018 - Late in the Day
(Author bio adapted from interview in the Independent, 5/25/2013, and from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Hadley is an immaculate stylist…Clever Girl isn't plot-driven and isn't a character study and isn't preoccupied with language, but its elements work in patient harmony. It is what could be called a "sensibility" novel—a story that doesn't overreach, about a character who feels real, told in prose that isn't ornate yet is startlingly exact. The effect is a fine and well-chosen pileup of experiences that gather meaning and power.
Meg Wolitzer - New York Times Book Review
Masterful, understated….Clever Girl, like the fiction of V.S. Pritchett or Alice McDermott, is devoted to capturing personality through small actions and expressions, to sparking characters into a vivid flame with a few exact descriptions and to distilling domestic settings into precious, even exalted significance.
Wall Street Journal
Looking for the next Kate Atkinson or Alice Munro? Pick up this lovely novel about a smart Englishwoman who’s also prickly and prone to misfortune.
People
Quietly brilliant….Hadley has always been adept at drawing out the unrecognisable from the everyday…. Domestic fiction is often disparaged as less than serious, but Hadley demonstrates admirably that the genre can carry weight.
Sunday Times (UK)
Lives which are unsophisticated yet experienced intensely, and gorgeously erudite prose are the distinguishing features of Tessa Hadley’s writing.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
Like Munro, Hadley is a writer both exact and lyrical, and there are many pleasures to be found along the way, particularly her sensual descriptions of nature, adolescence, and maternity.
Guardian (UK)
Compelling…. For all Stella’s spikiness and grittiness, there is a sensuousness to Hadley’s writing which revels in richly prolix descriptions of sights and states of mind…. Hadley has a genius for pithy analysis….The result consistently rings true despite its very literary artistry.
Times (UK)
Tessa Hadley is a clever writer who likes to play with form. Like Amish quilts, her novels are made up of homespun, domestic material, delicately worked over. Then you step back and see the bold structural decisions behind their composition.
New Statesman (UK)
It’s this very ordinariness that makes Hadley’s book so captivating. Clever Girl is one of those glorious novels about nothing in particular and everything there is in life, all at the same time.
National (UK)
This is Hadley’s extraordinary skill as a novelist: to navigate and narrate the fleeting moments in an individual’s life when the future crystallises, by choice and circumstance, for good or for bad.... Clever Girl is a remarkable novel by one of this country’s finest, if most unassuming talents.
Literary Review (UK)
Accomplished, elegant.... This novel is the life story of an ordinary, middle-aged woman-Stella. Only that she is not ordinary because Tessa Hadley is writing her into existence and is behind her like a following wind…. Hadley writes as a masterly illustrator might draw.
Observer (UK)
Hadley remains so fixed in Stella’s viewpoint that whatever this stubborn, lonely, eloquent character has to tell us, we accept....Subtle, intelligent, and realistic storytelling.
Evening Standard (UK)
An intimate, engrossing and eminently English coming of middle-age story from one of Britain’s finest writers….The narrative is episodic and deeply personal, but slowly coalesces to form a mosaic of British life over the past 50 years.
Independent (UK)
Involving…. Intrigues and engages…. The smooth narrative echoes Hadley’s cool and precise prose.... There’s plenty of family drama (including murder) but Hadley’s strength is in describing what is often left unnoticed.
Financial Times (UK)
Tessa Hadley is wonderful at surprising us with the domestic dramas that stir the embers of everyday life….Her reminiscences can resemble little bombs…. Hadley can make even English weather seem enthralling.
Toronto Star
(Starred review.) Hadley’s latest is told from the point of view of Stella, a lower-middle-class British girl born in the 1950s, whose experiences coming of age mirror the broader cultural development of her times.... [T]his carefully wrought novel transcends mere character study, offering up Stella’s story as a portrait of how accidents and happenstance can cohere into a life.
Publishers Weekly
Hadley, who's captured the imagination of the well-read everywhere with books like Married Love, returns with a book that vivifies a life typically lived, as we follow Stella from childhood with a single mum in a 1960s Bristol bedsit to the ups and downs of middle age. Not a huge first printing, but watch this one, especially for book clubs.
Library Journal
Growing up in Bristol with a single mother, Stella first realizes she’s clever...[but] not clever enough to avoid becoming pregnant at 16.... Hadley displays the keen insight and masterful portrayal of the domestic life for which she has become known. But this story...is more likely to be admired for Hadley’s sheer skill than embraced. —Michele Leber
Booklist
One relatively ordinary life, chronicled from the 1950s to the 1990s in England, mirrors enormous shifts in style, attitude and choice, especially for women. Domesticity...forms the connective tissue... Hadley is a fine, insightful writer, but this memoir of a restless, bookish woman coping with a sequence of variable male figures while playing the hand life has dealt her lacks momentum.
Kirkus Reviews
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