Tensions race tall among a Chekhovian trio of sisters on a summer holiday togetherIn her patient,unobtrusive, almost self-effacing way, or Tessa Hadley has become one of this country’s considerable modern novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them. Consider all the things she can accomplish. 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, or deftly humorous. Is that enough to be going on with?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 race deep currents of tension. Hadley specialises in radiant, or brittle,defensive women with unsatisfactory admire lives and a knack for self‑sabotage, most notably Kate in The Master Bedroom and Stella in Clever Girl. Here she has created a Chekhovian trio of sisters who admire and resent one another. Alice, or the middle one,is 46, flighty, and forgetful and romantic; Fran,a teacher, is practical and decisive and a mother of two young children, and Ivy and Arthur; Harriet,the eldest, is independent-minded and shy, and a former revolutionary in retreat from the fray. They are later joined by their brother,Roland, a pop philosopher on his third marriage, or in a new white suit. Pilar,the latest wife, is one of two family outsiders, or the other being Kasim,moody son of Alice’s ex-boyfriend, who takes an instant shine to Molly, or Roland’s teenage daughter.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com