The Master Bedroom, by Tessa Hadley
(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
Since Accidents in the Home was published in 2002, Tessa Hadley has perched uneasily between chick lit and literary fiction. Although Jonathan Cape has consistently marketed Hadley as literary, the paperback editions by Vintage, another imprint at the same publisher, have relegated her to the beach.
The British and American jacket designs of Hadley’s new novel, The Master Bedroom, similarly reveal a novel suspended between two genres. On Jonathan Cape’s jacket (right), the lettering is in white relief on an austere photographic chiaroscuro collaging details of a dark and forbidding house. A white bony back emerges from a heavy black dress. For the American edition (right, below), Henry Holt embosses pink lettering onto a pink background. This time the naked back is curvaceous and languid, reclining in bed and inviting the reader into a sensual romance.
For me, both Accidents and Hadley’s second novel, Everything Will Be All Right, failed to make the leap from popular to literary fiction. Certainly, unlike much chick lit, Accidents had something to say, and said it in clear, taut prose. Like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, it breached the taboo preventing women from admitting ambivalence to motherhood. In Accidents, Everything Will Be All Right and short stories in her third book, Sunstroke, Hadley suggests that maternal love can be accompanied by a hatred of the mundane and by a fear that the mushy mess of babies will engulf their mothers.
However, Accidents did nothing to unsettle or awaken the reader. After reading it I was left with no remembered atmosphere. Instead, Hadley offered a plethora of clunky social signifiers. Londoners had leather luggage and expensive clothes; countryfolk had bicycles, messy hair and ecology projects; the S&M lesbian had tattoos. Perhaps most problematically, Hadley was too insistent about the intellectual calibre of her heroines. Few female novelists apart from AS Byatt have portrayed so many characters with PhDs in English literature. But Hadley is not, like Byatt, an obsessively literary novelist. She is a novelist of the everyday, recording the quirks of ordinary lives. In Accidents and in Sunstroke, it felt as if we had to take the doctoral qualifications of the women as proof of their intelligence, because what we saw were women driven by the insistent imperatives of their hormones.
The Master Bedroom portrays another academic heroine, Kate, who is predictably allowing her brilliant mind to turn to mush as the novel opens. However, this time she is childless. She squanders her brain not for a child, but for an old woman. She gives up her academic job in London to return home to Cardiff to look after her mother, Billie. Here she falls for her best friend’s married brother, David, only to be pursued and ultimately impregnated by his 18-year-old son, Jamie. Where Clare in Accidents experienced pregnancy followed by mush followed by rejuvenation through academia, Kate experiences academia followed by mush followed by rejuvenation through pregnancy. In reversing her plot, Hadley frees herself from the preoccupations of the previous books, and her lucid style is released, unimpeded by cliché. Perhaps Kate’s childlessness liberates Hadley’s imagination, enabling her to go beyond the external and investigate the stranger world of Kate’s mind. Kate’s status as an academic allows Hadley to explore the breakdown ensuing when a woman accustomed to reading life as a metaphor loses the protecting cushions of academia.
The world of The Master Bedroom hoodwinks you and then stays with you. It is a peculiar, dusty world, captured by the shadowy photographs on the British cover; a world in which the ordinary newness of suburban Cardiff combines with the grandeur of Kate’s family’s dilapidated, messy house. This is not the cheerful academic mess of Clare’s UCL supervisor in Accidents or the grungy teenage mess of Pearl in Everything Will Be All Right. It is a sinister mess that engulfs normality until Kate’s watch fails and she loses sense of day and night, becoming unable to work or think.
This charged world, in which familiar objects become unearthly symbols, exists within the mundane. In the opening scene, Kate is involved in a motorway crash when a large white object falls from the sky. At first, Kate incorporates the object into a domestic framework, mistaking it for a bundle of dirty washing. Then, as it throws out “one long wing,” she sees the “dazzling white feathers ranged in rows of perfect symmetry” of a swan. The driver targeted by the dead bird turns out to be David’s wife, Suzie, who believes the swan to be his first wife, whose suicide involved a similarly vertiginous jump. The swan operates like the hot-air balloon accident in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, precipitating the action and bringing together characters. However, their lives are externally unchanged by the accident, which Kate quickly forgets. As a symbol, the swan refuses to signify; it is a manifestation of the unfamiliar lurking within the familiar everyday.
The Master Bedroom is not without the lumbering social signifiers of the previous books. Kate brings from London an expensive Italian handbag, floaty clothes and a Rachel Whiteread print, and is disparaging about David and Suzie’s pink carpet and faux-Victorian wallpaper. Although she is more convincing than Hadley’s previous academics, her pronouncements on literature are grating: “nothing written now has enough in it.”
Nonetheless, the novel withstands its flaws. Among its many strengths are the descriptions of the music heard at the concerts that bring Kate and David together and the unstrained portrayals of Billie and Jamie. Billie, endlessly buying delicate pink clothes she will never wear, charming the waiters she universally calls Jenny and Polly, whatever their gender, is a frustratingly lovable old lady whose death is touchingly described. Hadley depicts the strangeness of bereavement, which Kate circles in trepidation, wondering what shape it will take, without allowing it to intrude on Kate’s own arc, as subtly as she captures Kate’s peculiar relationship with Jamie. Kate accepts Jamie as her lover because she is exhausted, because he reminds her of David and because he is the kind of boy she pined for at 18. As she becomes sexually satisfied by him, she is always aware of the way his “completed adult face” is sealed over his childhood. Unlike Zoë Heller in Notes on a Scandal, Hadley never allows Kate’s relationship with Jamie to become a heavy-handed “issue.” It is just another unsettling, often excruciating chord in an unfamiliar love story. In this quirky tale of love and death in a suburban haunted house, Hadley has found a receptacle delicate enough to hold her clean, eloquent prose and has demonstrated herself to be a convincing literary novelist.
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