After the Funeral

I mentioned to a writer friend that I was reading this collection and she reminded me that I’d recommended Tessa Hadley’s novel Late in the Day to her some years ago; she was underwhelmed – ‘Why do you like her?’ I can’t wait to get this collection into her hands; I’m sure she’ll have to change her tune and it will be very obvious why I like Hadley’s writing.

These short stories have mostly been published in The New Yorker and are collected here for the first time. They have a similar melancholic air to Alice Munro’s stories; it’s these expositions of human frailties that attract me. An English couple and their adolescent daughter visit Florence; they’ve been before, they know their way around, the lie of the land. The father is pompous, the mother timid and the adolescent, well, adolescent. Her father proclaims that Italians resent tourists, who, unlike their family, don’t appreciate what they are seeing: their family is simpatico; they can trespass and intrude because they have a different sensibility. The daughter realises that they don’t; they are just as boorish and rude as all the other tourists.

In another story, a woman meets someone at a dinner party and is drawn to her. Years before, her father had died in a car crash in Europe together with a young woman; another young woman in the car was badly injured. The woman at the party recounts how she was injured in a car crash in Europe in which a man and her friend died.

A rather plain young woman has a side hustle cooking for her parents’ friends’ dinner parties; as word gets out, she’s called to a stranger’s house. The woman is very striking, glamorous and imperious; the house is beautiful. After the party, the woman offers to drive her home; she tells the young woman how unhappy she is; when they arrive at the young woman’s house, she doesn’t pay her for her work. It’s these small, unsettling details that make these stories so powerful and that attest to Hadley’s impressive talent.