Tessa Hadley "The Past"

"In her patient, unobtrusive, almost self-effacing way, Tessa Hadley has become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists… She writes brilliantly about families and their capacity for splintering. She is a remarkable and sensuous noticer of the natural world. She handles the passing of time with a magician’s finesse. She is possessed of a psychological subtlety reminiscent of Henry James, and an ironic beadiness worthy of Jane Austen. To cap it all, she is dryly, deftly humorous…These talents are on formidable display in her latest novel, The Past. It is the story of a family and a three-week summer holiday in the house they have inherited, beneath whose affable surface run deep currents of tension…Here she has created a Chekhovian trio of sisters who love and resent one another. Alice, the middle one, is 46, flighty, forgetful and romantic; Fran, a teacher, is practical and decisive and a mother of two young children, Ivy and Arthur; Harriet, the eldest, is independent-minded and shy, a former revolutionary in retreat from the fray. They are later joined by their brother, Roland, a pop philosopher on his third marriage, in a new white suit. Pilar, the latest wife, is one of two family outsiders, the other being Kasim, moody son of Alice’s ex-boyfriend, who takes an instant shine to Molly, Roland’s teenage daughter.”

    This quotation--somewhat shortened--I have filched from the review in The Guardian by the novelist Antony Quinn (Thank you, Mr. Quinn). The house where the cast of characters assemble for a holiday belonged to their grandparents, and it was the childhood home of their mother, Jill, and the vicarage of the ancient church close-by. Jill's father was the vicar, a poet, and a classical scholar, and Jill grew up much under his influence. She went to Oxford, got a first in Greats (Latin, Greek, and Philosophy) and then moved into marriage and motherhood. The novel is divided into three parts--Present, Past, and Present, and the middle section deals with Jill coming home to her parents--with three small children--as a means of breaking up her marriage to her journalist husband Tom. We are not far into the book--no 'spoiler alert' needed--when we learn that Jill died of cancer, and that Harriet, at sixteen, had to become something of a substitute mother to the younger siblings, whose number had by then been increased by the addition of Fran.

And so, in the two parts of the Present, our omniscient narrator explores in intriguing detail all that is going on in the minds of her characters--children as well as adults--and the story starts to focus on two major developments that come to fruition, both involving the non-family members:  Kasim, the Pakistani son of a prior lover of Alice, a student at LSE, and Pilar, the new wife of Roland, who is an exotic Argentinian lawyer. It does take some time before these two plot lines start to develop.

My experience with reading this book was similar to my reading of the Ferrante novels: once started, difficult to stop.Thoroughly recommended.