Tessa Hadley's short stories are set in a carefully delineated contemporary landscape – complete with Facebook, MP3 players and mobile phones, and in the background such current world events as the war in Afghanistan – yet they have a definite hint of the 19th century about them. Her prose style is delicate, restrained, sometimes erring on the side of formality; her narratives chart upheavals of the heart with earnest attention to psychological development. The world she writes about is ethnically homogenous but social distinctions are microscopically observed.
The posher characters in Married Love, her second collection of stories, have names such as Lottie, Ally and Em. They decorate their bedrooms with Hammershoi reproductions and photos of cave paintings, attend writers' retreats and are quite likely to play a musical instrument. The less well-to-do characters are called things such as Pam, Shelley and Roxanne; they smoke Embassy Regals, attach pine air fresheners to the rear-view mirrors of their cars and have husbands who sit around all day in front of the telly. Regardless of their class or background, however, all of Hadley's characters speak in beautifully constructed sentences and think fine, expansive thoughts.
Such a rarefied approach to narrative may well put some readers off. Too bad for them. Hadley is a writer of exceptional intelligence and skill and, for all the apparent conventionality of her vision, hers is a subtly subversive talent.
Like Alan Hollinghurst (though somewhat less emphatically), she brings a neo-Jamesian sensibility to bear on sexy, distinctly un-Jamesian subject matter; some of the sharpest lines in Married Love occur when she traces the emotional and psychological effects of sensual activity. After sex, one character is "returned too soon into her own possession" when her lover falls asleep; another, taking a line of cocaine, feels herself "densely concentrated in the present". These are precisely evocative descriptions of states that were, for one reason or another, either out of reach or out of bounds to the late Victorian authors whose prose Hadley's so often seems to emulate.
But even when she is writing about less obviously modern situations, Hadley pays the kind of attention to her characters' lives that means she can always find something new to see.
The title story of this collection sets out from a familiar premise: an undergraduate announces to her parents that she is having an affair with one of her lecturers and that she is going to marry him. But where many short story writers might leave it at that – merely describing the ensuing clash between the outraged protective instincts of the parents and the outraged self-belief of the girl – Hadley follows her protagonist into her marriage, tracing the slow rot of her potential and her pluckiness, her journey from a person with "a gift for vehemence" to one who speaks with emotion "only about her children and about money". Yet Hadley never allows the love her protagonist feels for her much older husband to die altogether; the effect is to uncover new layers of complexity in a well-worn fictional trope.
Similarly, in "The Godchildren", two men and a woman, all in their early 50s, meet for the first time since childhood to collect their inheritance from their late godmother. As they wander around her house, their memories of it, and of her, and of each other, contrast and rub up against one another. The scenario (a reunion of childhood friends well into middle age) is hardly new, but Hadley imbues it with a powerful sense of the sadness of vanished loyalties and missed opportunities.
Only Alice Munro and Colm Tóibín, among all the working short story writers I'm aware of, are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. With Married Love, Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys. She is not an innovative writer, perhaps, but she excites nevertheless in the freshness and variety of her perceptions, the way she uses established techniques to tell us urgent truths about the here and now.
