Tessa Hadley, in After the Funeral, is at home with the short story because she is a master of non-elaboration. She leaves it to her readers to fill in the gaps, make judgments on the quiet. The pleasure is not unlike reading Jane Austen: we have the inside track on what is being said – we know more about her characters than they know about themselves. She pulls off the feat of being leisurely yet economical – there is no slack. As one of our finest novelists, she has, throughout her writing life, been a short story supremo, publishing three or four collections and contributing to the New Yorker since 2002. It is hard to imagine stories more skilfully paced and polished than these.
The funeral, in the title story, is for Philip Lyons, a pilot. He was distant as a family man and his young daughters are not shattered by his death, but Marlene, his wife, is devastated, not least because he died in a New York hotel room in compromising circumstances (the implications of which are left for us to guess at). Hadley oversees mourners and introduces the mother-in-law in a calculatedly nonjudgmental sentence as someone who “collected old Delft and read all the new novels and taught piano”. A blameless specimen – we instantly suspect we are unlikely to share her high opinion of herself.
Hadley is not always on the back foot. At times, she abandons discretion in favour of the joys of not holding back. Marlene’s sister, at the same party, is dispatched as a “poisonous puff-ball in a mustard-coloured trouser suit”. Throughout, she has the ability to see through the various ways in which people perform as themselves. In Old Friends, she writes: “…he was one of those men who thrust his imperfect body shamelessly, even keenly, in your line of sight, with a winning, uninhibited unconsciousness, as if he’d never noticed he wasn’t a cherub any longer”. Most of us have met a version of this man.
But it is about women that these enjoyable stories are most concerned. Hadley acknowledges that, for many women, the difficulties are with one another. She writes intriguingly about mother/daughter relationships where the mothers seem, unpardonably, younger than their daughters. In My Mother’s Wedding, Janey comments: “That was the way life was divided up between me and my mother. I knew about things, and she was beautiful.”
Hadley is also preoccupied with women’s independence. Marlene, in After the Funeral, will not marry a doctor who requires her to give up her work (even though her job is in a supermarket). In Dido’s Lament, Lynette – her youth behind her – is hanging on to an independence she has arguably outgrown, ashamed not to have become the successful singer she aspires to be. Hadley is fascinated by how tenacious a sense of identity, established early on, can be. Serena, in The Bunty Club, youngest of three, is another self-styled free spirit, attempting to be an exception to a sisterly rule, dressed in black, smoking mutinously – not a cool look in middle age.
Hadley is superb at catching an atmosphere – the character of a moment. In The Bunty Club opens on an early summer morning: “It was the best time. Reflected off the estuary water, the light seemed a blond powder, sifted through the summer air on to grass that grew waist-high, its mauve seed-heads heavy with the dew which soaked her skirt.” And she exclaims: “Everything was to come! This unknown day!” In Cecilia Awakened, a 15-year-old wakes up to find herself “in the wrong skin” for reasons that almost (but not quite) defy language as she tilts into adulthood. And when Lynette is knocked down on the London underground (you learn about character through action in Hadley’s stories), outrage flips into comprehensive lament: “Suddenly she hated this afternoon, this whole day, her whole life.” These atmospheres are relatable, sympathetic, complicated. The most satisfying of the stories have a dot, dot, dot quality – continuing in our minds. And what arises most persuasively – and painfully – in all of them is the sense that no one can help being themselves.
• After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
