I like to read stories about ordinary lives, so I looked forward to this novel by Tessa Hadley. In ten discrete chapters, we experience the life of an ordinary Englishwoman named Stella from childhood to middle age. Written in the first person, we see Stella\u2019s life as she sees it: her experience of the events of the last half of the 20th century.Hadley beautifully captures what life was like during that turbulent time: we get Stella\u2019s teenaged rebellion of embracing punk culture with her androgynous boyfriend Valentine, and later her avoiding the arguments about politics in her commune, and so on to the end of the century. Hadley also shines at using quick, precise details to capture a person, place or thing. When she finds buttons at an old bombsite, they are \u201ca coral rose, wooden toggles, a diamant\u00e9 buckle, big yellow bone squares, toggles made of bamboo.\u201d Of Stella\u2019s grandmother, she says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As writers, we\u2019re told that the first page of your novel should not only grab the reader but also introduce the main character, the time and place, the main character\u2019s goal, and a hint at who or what might stand in the way of achieving it. Looking at this novel\u2019s first page, we can confidently check off a few items. Our narrator is a child living alone with her mother in the 1950s and early 1960s, though only later do we find out they are in Bristol. She and her mother get along well, sharing the same tastes.The first paragraph is about Stella\u2019s missing father, \u201cunpoetically\u201d named Bert. Her mother says that he is dead but in the same sentence we are told that \u201cI only found out years later that he\u2019d left, walked out when I was eighteen months old.\u201d As it turns out, this undercutting of Stella\u2019s present-day experience by the interjection of knowledge acquired in the future will continue throughout the book. As a result, there is little suspense. We know, for example, who will die before the scene plays out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I like to read stories about ordinary lives, so I looked forward to this novel by Tessa Hadley. In ten discrete chapters, we experience the life of… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"views":98,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44156,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44154\/revisions\/44156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}