Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley

If you like Maggie O’Farrell you’ll like Tessa Hadley.  If you like Tessa Hadley you’ll like Maggie O’Farrell.

One of things they have in common is a certain theatricality to their work.  Not in the cinematographic way you might find in other authors work, novels that the reader experiences as similar to viewing a film or, at the very least, thinking when reaching the end, “This would make a great movie!”   And not in sense of over the top emoting theatrical but as in the conventions of the stage. 

This ‘staged’ aspect is often apparent in the way that dialogue is used.  Conversation between characters is declarative and revelatory.  These pivotable conversations tend to take place in socially intimate spaces; sitting rooms, around dinner tables, bedrooms and even the narrative descriptions of these locales very often have a stage set quality to them.  For example, although in this instance it’s describing an outdoor setting, the opening chapter of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2010 Costa Award winning The Hand That First Held Mine reads like a playscript stage setting and segues into an extended passage of witty repartee. 

In Tessa Hadley’s latest novel, Late in the Day, much of the story moves forward through the declarations characters in conversation make to each other, often inadvertently revealing a truth in such a way as to participate plot development.  These, by and large, take place in interior spaces described in such a way that would allow a stage manager to dress the scene.  Student digs, by the way, are never anything but squalidly messy and smelling of damp. 

It is this importance of the verbal, and its curious artificiality, over the visual and the authorial omniscient third person that makes the case for the theatrical connection.

The friendship between two women, Christine and Lydia, is at heart of this novel.  Actually, it’s all the other body parts as well.  With the occasional side trip to another character’s experience, we see everything from Christine’s viewpoint.  Lydia, we know only from the outside.  The women present as a premier example of a chalk and cheese dichotomy.  Christine is an introvert, Lydia is extravert; deep versus shallow, disciplined as opposed to lazy, one talented but insecure the other breezily dilettantish and so it goes.  With a slightly creepy doppelganger effect their respective daughters mirror this relationship. 

It requires a fair degree of suspension of disbelief that these two have had a decades long deep and incredibly entwinned friendship.  Opposites attract?  They complete each other?  Is there something about women’s friendships that I, as a man, just don’t get?

Speaking of men, the ones in this novel are ciphers.  They, whether a difficult and moody failed writer or an avuncular and wealthy gallery owner, seemingly exist simply as pieces in a boardgame Christine and Lydia, for reasons perhaps unknow to themselves, have devoted their adult lives to playing.

In spite of the preceding criticisms. I am enjoying this novel.  Tessa Hadley is a quite good enough writer to carry the reader along and she does pull off the trick of making the highly unlikely, credible.

 I would, however, rate her last to this one, The Past, a better read. 

And for something really masterful on the theme of a lifelong friendship between two couples, Wallace Stegner’s 1987 novel, Crossing to Safety.