Fiction Subjects

Married Love

Name: Married Love
Author: Tessa Hadley
ISBN: 9780062135643

by Tessa Hadley

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Overview

Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today’s most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents’ party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets. In this stunning collection, Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect.

Synopsis

"A supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence," (New York Times Book Review), Tessa Hadley is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, including The London Train, a New York Times Notable Book. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, Hadley returns to the short story form in this brilliant collection, her first since the celebrated Sunstroke and Other Stories. Married Love showcases beautifully her formidable talent for writing domestic fiction that rises about the genre to become literary art.

About the Author, Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley is the author of four highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award; Everything Will Be All Right; The Master Bedroom; The London Train, which was a New York Times Notable Book; and a previous collection of stories, Sunstroke, also a New York Times Notable Book. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.

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Editorials

The New York Times Book Review

Married Love…is filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class, conducted with symphonic intensity and complexity. Hadley is fearless when it comes to noticing, say, the subtle but piercing differences between neighborhoods where utterly unwooded streets are named Clover Close or Oak Grove and places are called Old Hall, Stone House, Long End, the Rectory. She knows, and will show the reader in full narrative daylight, the rigorously scrubbed cleanliness of the lower middle class and the voluptuously careless messiness of the upper. No matter what records are playing or what progressive conversation might be under way, she follows the money…[an] understatedly beautiful collection…
—Stacey D'Erasmo

Publishers Weekly

Every story in this very English collection by New Yorker contributor Hadley (Accidents in the Home) juxtaposes the promise, even magnificence, of a rich inner life against the disappointing banality of everyday existence. In the title story, the author allows a willful girl to fling herself headlong into an ill-advised marriage, then makes us watch as all her pluck, all her potential, slowly dries up. In other stories, the author gives her characters refuge—a fecund greenhouse, the city of Venice, a house remembered from childhood—but ensures that they are not happy there, that each place is dark or rainy or infested with off-putting people. When Hadley sets a story (“In the Country”) in the bucolic English countryside on a perfect summer weekend among the members of a loving family, it isn’t long before her protagonist imagines being buried alive, “earth in her mouth and nose and ears... her flesh turning to a dry brown fertilising cake.” Disillusion is Hadley’s stock in trade. She is kind to the families she creates—mothers and fathers especially are respected, even revered. But when she dissects them with her sharp instruments of observation, she strikes nerves that can cause pain. Agent: Joy Harris, the Joy Harris Literary Agency. (Dec.)

Booklist

"Hadley’s command of the telling detail, the unspoken riposte, and the subtle interpersonal struggles that fuel everyday human actions infuses this collection with both saucy fire and sobering fatalism."

Stacey D'Erasmo

"Filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class, conducted with symphonic intensity and complexity….[An] understatedly beautiful collection….Extraordinarily well-made."

Kate Tuttle

"A British writer whose work probes the dangers and joys of family life, Tessa Hadley writes like a dream, even if some of her stories can haunt you like a nightmare….Hadley’s measured, perfectly controlled prose masterfully chronicles her characters’ turmoil; these stories are gemlike and unforgettable."

Helen Davies

"Hadley’s power...is best felt as she teases out the often dangerous crackles in the air and cracks in the heart. There’s a louche tautness to her prose..."

Rachel Hore

"[Hadley’s stories] are often like movie clips of lives in transit, their small shifts of focus yielding up flashes of psychological insight. . . . Hadley excels at the domestic context, at pinpointing the particular quiddity on which an individual character turns; at marking the tiny swings of allegiance in human relationships."

Philip Womack

"One of the most interesting writer around....This collection shows a writer quietly growing in style, perception and grace. She conveys to the reader that rare ability to see completely into someone else’s head."

Edmund Gordon

"Only Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin, among all the working short story writer 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."

Fanny Blake

"Domestic relationships are the stuff of these delightfully understated, tightly sprung stories."

Elena Seymenliyska

"Married Love…could more accurately be described as a concentration, not a collection, of short stories. The stories here are, in effect, a dozen novels in miniature....There is a grand sweep and an emotional charge that brings to mind DH Lawrence."

Meredith Maran

"Hadley excels at the poignantly comic scene and the dangling ending that somehow still satisfies. These 12 touching tales showcase her gifts."

Susannah Meadows

"Her talent is to take these small details of everyday life and build them into stirring narratives….Hadley gives space to the smallest emotional currents, allowing them to expand."

Heller McAlpin

"What Hadley’s stories share with Munro’s is an extraordinary ability to capture whole worlds - the hopes, disappointments, complexity and arc of characters’ lives - in concise prose that never feels rushed."

Evening Standard (London)

"A feast of angst and disappointment."

Andrea Huehnerhoff

“Twisting her pen with words so skilled and a sensitivity so finely honed it takes mere fragments to convey the lifetime of a character to the reader, Hadley brings us twelve of the finest short stories in print today.”

Library Journal

These stories are rich in character and steeped in class consciousness. In the exquisite title story, a 19-year-old violin student shocks her family by announcing that she intends to marry her music teacher, a married man 45 years her senior. To no one's surprise, things don't go well: three babies come along in rapid succession, her music career is forgotten, and other young women catch her husband's eye. Other stories capture familiar slice-of-life moments: a cleaning woman, diligently scrubbing toilets in an industrial work site, is preoccupied with her son's safe return from Afghanistan; a rectory-raised college student visiting her boyfriend's parents for the first time overhears his mother ridiculing her posh accent; and a schoolgirl's new friendship with a girl from "the Homes" is a cause for concern to her mother. VERDICT There is not a lot of domestic bliss to be found in these finely rendered stories, but there are many small moments of everyday life made recognizable by an exceptional storyteller. Highly recommended.—Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., ON

Kirkus Reviews

A subtly incisive vision and the ability to conjure full fictional scenarios in limited spaces characterize the new collection by a noted British writer. In her second volume of stories, Hadley (The London Train, 2011, etc.) considers private fears, bad decisions, tipping points and unexpected assertions of free will, via 12 short fictions, six originally published in The New Yorker. "The Trojan Prince" introduces a young merchant seaman in the 1920s, flirting with the daughter of a wealthy family but ultimately choosing not to respond to her signals of attraction. In "A Mouthful of Cut Glass," one of several stories reflecting social schisms, two college students take their partners home to meet the family and come face to face with the class divide. The comfortable middle classes, an easy target, are pictured often, hosting boozy parties with unintended consequences in "Because the Night" or, in the title tale, coping badly with a teenager's announcement of marriage: "Whatever for?" responds the mother, "Dad and I have never felt the need." The strongest tales are at the front of the collection, though the briefer later ones linger on the palate too, like "In the Cave," which pinpoints an infinitesimal but irrevocable emotional shift. Shrewd, insightful, unpredictable, Hadley's stories successfully plumb the complicated daily deeps.