Review by New York Times Review
ANY NOVELIST WHO'S EVER Stood in a bookstore, watching as someone picks up a copy of her book and pauses before returning it to the shelf, knows there's no logical explanation for why particular books appeal to particular people. Over time, though, readers do tend to make intuitive decisions. Someone who wants a fast-moving story may seek out what she imagines is a plot-driven novel. Someone who wants to spend time in close quarters, getting to know a person like herself, or perhaps like no one she's ever met, may choose what appears to be a characterdriven novel. And someone who tends to pepper margins with exclamation points, who calls a friend to shout, "Listen to this line!," may gravitate toward a book preoccupied with language. Tessa Hadley's unusual, subtle new novel, "Clever Girl," is difficult to categorize. The narrator, Stella, age 50, looks back on her life over the course of 10 episodic chapters, starting in Bristol, England, where she is raised by a single mother. In the beginning, they live quietly together, watching "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." while curled under the eiderdown. But when her mother remarries, there's a new stepfather, whom Stella can't warm to, and a new baby brother, to whom she can. Stella reads voraciously, realizing that "the books were an initiation." Eventually she comes to understand that she is "clever," a state that feels like "a sensation of divinity." She also comes to realize that a certain kind of life awaits a clever girl. But then - bam - Stella meets sexy, arty, rebellious Valentine. "His glancing, eagerly amused look around him - drinking everything in, shaking the long hair back from around his face - was like a symbol for morning itself." The passages about teenage Stella's sexual absorption are marvelous. She knows, without entirely knowing, that her interest in Valentine is different from his interest in her: "Kissing, he pecked dry kisses all over my face with a satirical, popping noise." As her involvement with Valentine deepens, her mother and stepfather become unbearable. Stella will "die" if her life turns out as "boring and narrow" as theirs. "Just you wait, my mother warned. - Boring or not, you'll have to get on with it like everybody else." Which turns out to be true. The night Stella and Valentine make plans to chuck everything and go off together, they have sex for the first time. But later, when a small, shocking act leads Valentine to leave by himself, Stella imagines she'll simply return to her old life. She'll "be a clever girl again, and get to university." "But I wasn't that clever, was I?" It seems that Stella is pregnant. The future of the clever girl is, she concludes, no longer available to her. Hadley's narrative follows Stella through the hard, early years of single motherhood and work, then keeps moving forward. A second child is born, to another father. There's life on a 1970s commune, where a sudden death takes place. Despite this, "action" only occasionally punctuates what might be called a quiet novel by readers who measure their fiction in decibels. Plot-driven? It would be hard to make that case. The characters on the commune are only partly rendered. Stella herself is muted in her responses to what happens to her. It's tempting to feel annoyed by what comes off as passivity, but this suggests that all characters should be able to determine the shape of their lives, that if they don't they ought to be slapped into consciousness until they become reassuringly more the way we wish them (and ourselves) to be. Novels are often about people who make large and important choices, though in real life the chance to make such choices comes rarely and pivotal moments sometimes aren't revealed until long after the fact. Because we don't see much of Stella's decision-making process, the choices she does make can seem unwilled, inevitable. Through Stella, "Clever Girl" examines the seldom-explored landscape you might call "befalling." It's fair to say that character isn't the most striking element of this novel either. The language can certainly be striking, since Hadley is an immaculate stylist. As a girl, Stella loves to ride horses. "Kissing his nose," she remarks of one favorite, "I made contact, through the hot pelt grown close like stubbly chenille on the hard bone of his skull, with that urgent wordless horse life which moved me so inexpressibly." Later, admiring these animals' innocent "shamelessness," she recalls that "sometimes as you led the ponies back into a stall where you'd just put out clean bedding, they pissed into it voluptuously." Voluptuously! Who but a writer excited by the singing possibilities of language would locate that word? Yet the language is embedded modestly in the novel, and rarely dominates. At the end of "Clever Girl," when Stella (who does finally get to university, but who abruptly and surprisingly gives up an academic future) is settled into a vaguely described career as an occupational therapist and marriage to a solid, older businessman, it makes sense that the long-lost Valentine should reappear. And though the moment when he and Stella are reunited is suspenseful and effective, Hadley has done little to prime the reader for his return. She's been too concerned with fleshing out the parameters of Stella's actual life to dwell on what never came to be. i was reminded, reading this novel, of another recent British import, set partly in the 1960s, Margaret Drabble's "The Pure Gold Baby," in which a young woman becomes pregnant and decides to raise her child, who has an intellectual disability, on her own. Drabble (whose 1965 novel "The Millstone" was about a young Cambridge graduate who becomes a single mother) is known for her early fiction's depiction of accomplished, independent, "clever" girls. "The Pure Gold Baby" is different; like the narrator of Hadley's book, Drabble's protagonist doesn't fulfill her academic promise, wading instead into a whole other, unexpected life. Neither novel fetishizes being young, and both place a muted female character, specifically a single mother, against a somewhat distant backdrop of social change. But the effect, in the end, is different. Drabble's novel, narrated by an old friend of the protagonist, has a deliberately anthropological feel. Hadley's is closer-grained, unusually realistic about how lives get lived. It provides an important corrective to the assumption that all people at all times possess that buzzword, "agency." "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. Near the end, Stella thinks "that the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than all the invisible turmoil of the inner life, which we set such store by." Stella may not stand out, but Tessa Hadley certainly does. Hadley's novel examines the seldom-explored landscape you might call 'befalling.' MEG WOLITZER'S most recent novel is "The Interestings."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 16, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Growing up in Bristol with a single mother, Stella first realizes she's clever when she solves a physics problem with sudden insight. Her cleverness seems confirmed when she and brilliant Valentine become inseparable in a life of the mind. But she's not clever enough to avoid becoming pregnant at 16, after having sex just twice with Val, who's left for America. When Stella's in the greatest need, her own hard work and the kindness of others help sustain her through motherhood, communal living, tragedy, affair, and marriage to the age of 50, when she understands that the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than the invisible turmoil of the inner life. . . . The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you. Hadley (Married Love, 2012) displays the keen insight and masterful portrayal of the domestic life for which she has become known. But this story of how narrator Stella lives out what befalls her is more likely to be admired for Hadley's sheer skill than embraced.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hadley's (The London Train) 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. The child of divorced parents, Stella is clever in school and seems destined to go on to a university. But after being abandoned by a boyfriend and discovering she is pregnant (her son, Luke, eventually goes on to be a teacher), Stella's life takes a series of left turns. While working as a waitress, she falls in with a group of art students, and eventually goes to live in their commune, where she gets pregnant again by a new boyfriend who's tragically killed before the baby is born. After a dispiriting stint as a married businessman's mistress, Stella returns to school and resumes the trajectory of her waylaid life. The simplicity of its story is one of this novel's great strengths: the uncluttered plot allows for Stella's pains, humiliations, and instances of self-discovery to be confidently inhabited and rendered with emotional precision. Looking back over her life, Stella can be wistful about people and places ("Sometimes I'm nostalgic for that old intricate decay, as if it was a vanished subtler style"), but tellingly, she is often at a loss to explain or precisely remember her motivations, "as if a switch flicked between two versions of myself, I suddenly wasn't all right." In the end, this 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. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A middle-aged woman relates her life story from the 1960s to the present, a coming-of-age, after age, after age story, as she evolves into womanhood in the UK. Bright and industrious, a mother at an early age, Stella is filled with unresolved fury and rebellion. She is always most gratified when situations or people save her from herself. Dramatic and realistic, Stella's story includes violent deaths, failed affairs, and broken hearts. The book is not so much about what she chooses in her life as it is about how she lives out what befalls her. A uniquely gifted writer, Hadley (Married Love), never vague, possesses a narrative voice that moves the characters through their phases with parenthetic irony. Like an artist dabbing in precise luminous details, she has a masterly grasp of pivotal moments and renders them with brilliant economy. VERDICT This is an absorbing work, sure to appeal to readers who are in touch with their own inner voices. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/13.]-Joyce Townsend, -Pittsburg, CA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 of many kinds--rich, poor, hippie, straight--forms the connective tissue in Hadley's (Married Love, 2012, etc.) fifth novel, narrated by Stella, a girl of her times. Growing up in the postwar decade without a father (Stella is told he has died, although that's not true), she experiences a childhood bound by convention and a shortage of cash. When her mother remarries, Stella finds herself in competition and conflict with her stepfather. But friends sustain her, notably Valentine, her soul mate, a boy with rebellious modern ideas and drugs. Sex only happens between them twice, but Stella falls pregnant and becomes a single mother herself, a choice which derails her hopes for college. Instead, she becomes a housekeeper, then moves into a commune and becomes pregnant again. This time, the father is unexpectedly killed. Stella is a caring mother yet a prickly character--suspicious, private, critical. Eventually, she does find some success. Yet life remains stormy, with new chapters continuing to open. 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
