Caught up by life’s tripwires on a tangled journey from poverty to fulfilment

Tessa Hadley's fifth novel tells the story of Stella, only child of a single mother in 1960s Bristol. A clever girl, able to claw her way towards a life of ideas and excitement, she is stopped in her tracks by a series of tripwires. This is subtle, intelligent and realistic storytelling, says Claire Harman
Claire Harman24 May 2013

Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley (Cape, £16.99)

Tessa Hadley’s fifth novel tells the story of Stella, only child of a single mother in 1960s Bristol, for whom biology really is destiny. Stella has scarcely begun to understand that she is indeed a “clever girl”, able to claw her way, via the scholarship system, towards a life of ideas and excitement unlike anyone else’s in her family, when she hits the first of many tripwires. A teenage pregnancy, a series of terrible skivvy jobs, abandonment, another baby; being female seems to take her beyond her own control, but perhaps, she reflects, “the highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you”.

Stella preserves herself through books and a slantwise commentary on her class, conjured up in perfectly chosen detail — the Berni Inns, the family dos, the autumn-leaf curtains, the dressing tables with their backs to the windows. Tessa Hadley is simply brilliant at this, capturing not just the smell and the look of a time and place, but its spirit, as in this description of the school shower room, “with its concentrated citrus-rot of female sweat, its fleshly angsts, tinpot team spirit, gloom of girls passed over, games teacher’s ogling, trodden soaking towels”.

But is it enough to simply watch your life unfold? Plenty happens to Stella (there are two murders in this book) but she is constantly aware of a filter in operation. When she sees her lover’s wife in a public place, Stella feels a “stock guilt that could have come out of one of my Victorian novels. But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion?”

A crux comes when she goes back to school and realises “I could be clever at last”. Just knowing this is enough, and Stella’s striving collapses into a life of usefulness to others, a niceish job, marriage to the former lover, care of two sons by different fathers and an adopted daughter. Perhaps the biggest stretch in the story is believing that this patchwork household could ever cohere, but Hadley remains so fixed in Stella’s viewpoint that whatever this stubborn, lonely, eloquent character has to tell us we accept.

Clever Girl is about nothing adding up. Towards the end, the narrative goes into the present tense and bears us into an unknowable future. Suspense, of a kind, and entirely in keeping with Tessa Hadley’s subtle, intelligent and realistic storytelling.

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