Tessa Hadley began her adult life as a schoolteacher; she found the work so difficult, she would wake up in a panic every day. When she escaped to a new role--motherhood--she would tell herself, "No matter how many tantrums there are, no matter the tears.....I do NOT have to teach today."
As her kids grew older, Hadley found herself writing about Henry James, and she found herself writing stories. She badly, badly wanted to publish her fiction--and so, in her mid-forties, she launched a new career. Now, in her sixties, she is seen as one of the great writers of realist fiction, next to Colm Toibin, Alice Munro, Hilary Mantel.
"Free Love," Hadley's new novel, is about family. (All her books are about family.) It's 1967, and a woman, Phyllis, finds herself vaguely interested in the revolutionary stirrings in London. Phyllis is forty and trapped in an "OK" marriage, with children. A young guest--a friend's son--visits, and Phyllis tries to flirt. And the flirting leads to shocking sex--outdoors--before the evening is over.
After this, Phyllis believes that she can just resume her bourgeois life--but new thoughts are bubbling up. The exact moment of rupture is stunning and bizarre (and this seems true to reality):
Phyllis was talking to someone at a party, in the midst of all the hubbub of voices...He was perfectly nice, with warm brown eyes and speckled hair, bulky and at ease, one of those men whose expression communicates keenly how much they want to get to know you, until it turns out they only want to talk about themselves. Or in this case, about camping holidays....how these days in a tent you could replicate all the conveniences of home, even down to a canvas washing-up bowl on a stand. And how the facilities in campsites in Brittany were improving. "I know you're imagining the whole nightmare of French toilets," he said, as if he really wanted to persuade her. "That fearsome old stinking hole in the ground. We've all been there. But the French know that's got to change, if they want to attract the tourists."
"Excuse me," Phyllis said then.....
It's at this moment that Phyllis wanders out of the party, abandons her house, abandons her family, and begins a new bohemian life.
The life has twists and turns; the new man isn't what Phyllis wants or expects (shocker!) .....One child of Phyllis's will harden his heart--forever. The other will begin her own rebellious phase--inspired by Mom. Phyllis herself will revisit the bourgeois mansion to collect some coats; the housekeeper will study Phyllis's male escort. "No," Phyllis says, "that's not my new lover. My lover is someone you would stare at. He is someone you'd leave your family for."
We last see Phyllis when she is raising an infant. She has taken a job at a factory; she sees the maggots in the flour everyday. She has another guy in her life; it’s someone who ravages her on the banks of a filthy river. Phyllis's new workmates sometimes view her with suspicion, as if she has wandered in from another planet--but, sometimes, everyone is kind to one another.
This is a daring book because Phyllis is a catastrophe; it isn't easy to like her. She reminds me of Jessa, from "Girls"; people disliked Jessa, I think mainly because Jessa's selfishness sometimes led viewers to think about their *own* selfishness (and this is uncomfortable).
Why do we have to want to eat lunch with each and every protagonist?
I enjoyed Hadley's new book. It's like an especially vivid dream--strange and unpredictable--and this is what I would want from any novel.
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