An earnest schoolgirl stares from the cover of Tessa Hadley's fourth novel.
James Cowie's pencil portrait captures the dreaminess and sharp mind of Hadley's narrator. As her heroine's life-story unfolds, the cover image becomes even more appropriate. Cowie was a master of the everyday, finding fascination and meaning in the mundane, as does Hadley, one of British fiction's artists of the ordinary world. If Clever Girl can be reduced to a single theme, it is the significance of the commonplace, the dull and repetitive, the unglamorous but essential daily task of keeping body, if not soul, in order.
Hadley's storyteller is Stella, her name a constant reminder of her intellectual brilliance. From the vantage point of 50, she surveys her life, finally able to see its geography, making sense of the meandering paths, the dead-ends and the pitfalls she has experienced.
Brought up by her mother, unaware that her father is not dead, as she has been told, but that he had walked out when she was a toddler, Stella has a happy childhood. Not even a shocking death in the family can dent her spirits. It is only with the arrival of a stepfather that her confidence falters, her position centre stage now challenged.
At this point, in defiant and objectionable adolescence, Stella discovers rebellion and sex. Swiftly thereafter, instead of the glittering university career she had envisaged for herself, she becomes a single mother, just like her own.
What follows is a fussily detailed and not always interesting autobiography, unfolding in plain linear fashion (with a distracting plethora of parentheses), like an overlong catch-up conversation between friends. Told in a matter-of-fact tone which, for all Hadley's descriptive skills, has a flattening effect, Clever Girl is neither misery memoir nor cautionary tale. Instead, it is the probing depiction of a highly intelligent young woman and what she makes of life when she has no option but to spend much of it washing, cleaning and tidying.
It's no surprise that she finally reflects, with bitterness, "Why must the world of real things always be relegated to second place, as if it was a lesser order, as if everything abstract was higher and more meaningful?"
We watch with sympathy as the not always sympathetic Stella stumbles from exhausted early motherhood in an aunt's back bedroom into a succession of live-in domestic jobs, until she discovers friendship and tragedy in a commune. That experience produces another baby, so that by the time Stella has reached the relative tranquility of her half century – having acquired a third child on the way – motherhood and domesticity are the immovable rail tracks which have dictated the direction and pace of her life.
Reprising ideas explored in her earlier works, among them what it means to grow up, Clever Girl looks unflinchingly at parenting. As one woman tells Stella, "the biology – the blood and genes and stuff – only means as much as you choose it to". It's a belief borne out in every chapter of this novel.
But Hadley's slowburn tale of a life less conventional is also a report from the frontline of ordinary middle-age. As Stella reflects, "It's painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for some absolute transformation of everything. But it's also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you're simply in your own hands at last."
Reminiscent of Janice Galloway, but without the oomph, Clever Girl is artfully simple and deceptively unstructured. There are moments of high drama, as in any life, but Hadley's undemonstrative voice drains the least hint of melodrama or theatricality, to the point where this reader was longing for the story to break cover and grab one by the collar. Covering a cornucopia of subjects, among them the small matter of the meaning of life, this is the oddly monotonous story of a restless, irritable woman who has been rooted and frustrated by motherhood and love but is, by the end, very glad of her tether.
Clever Girl
Tessa Hadley
Jonathan Cape, £16.99
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