‘The bus company’s yellow tin sign on its concrete post seemed for a long while a forlorn flag announcing nothing,’ notes Stella, the narrator of Tessa Hadley’s new novel Clever Girl. Stella moves from childhood in 1950s Bristol through a series of episodes to end up married and financially secure. However, a ‘flag announcing nothing’ might describe some of these discrete episodes, which sometimes fail to contribute to the larger narrative of Stella’s life. It’s as if the book is a study in the misunderstanding of consequence, where this misunderstanding is played out at a formal level. An early encounter between a child and a seemingly dangerous man appears to play no part in Stella’s psychological development. There are two murders, but only one of these really makes any mark on her. When the man who is probably her father becomes her driving instructor, he drives off again without her saying a word. When she completes her degree in English Literature, she decides on a whim to retrain as an occupational therapist rather than apply for a PhD. The arbitrariness of these incidents could be brilliantly realistic; but as Clever Girl is full of more unrealistic re-encounters and events than one life could witness, even the messier moments are suspect.
The novel carries an epigraph from Charlotte Lennox’s 1752 The Female Quixote. Like Don Quixote before it, Lennox tells the tale of a character who has become deluded through reading too many chivalric romances. Invoking the picaresque explains the episodic nature of Clever Girl, making it easier to see the abstract thematic ambition threaded through Stella’s modest life. It also might explain Valentine, who is the thinnest character in the book. He has a ‘swaggering walk’ and ‘Caravaggio cheekbones’; he wears eyeliner and wants to live in Paris or New York as a writer; he reads Beckett and Burroughs (edgy versions of Stella’s Anne of Green Gables). He takes drugs and likes cool bars, and, of course, he gets Stella pregnant and ruins her chances of university. Valentine is the personification of some heady dream, a modernisation of the picaresque’s investment in the chivalric-as-delusion. At the time Stella finds him heady and mesmeric, but later she looks back and feels only ‘contempt for my deluded previous self.’
The adversarial nature of life and art is the book’s enduring theme, and it’s well handled. Stella muses, post-Valentine, that Beckett and Burroughs would ‘despise’ what she had ‘no choice’ but to spend her life on: ‘washing, cooking, shopping, cleaning’. She comes to enjoy the ‘less good’ Victorian novels (ie, she likes Middlemarch but she prefers minor works by less accomplished authors): ‘the very fact of these novels being so obliquely angled to my own life was part of the relief of my escape into them… dressing drudgery up as a poignant adventure…’ Later, when she meets the wife of the man she’s having an affair with, she sees her reaction as ‘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?’ Like events in the novel, elements of this sentence just don’t add up. What do ‘sentimentality’ and ‘cynicism’ have to do with her ‘stock guilt’? Is the argument that guilt is sentimental — and therefore novelistic — but also very real? This claim for ‘sentimentality’ as ‘the truth of life’ makes me suspicious that the looser, inconsequential bits of Hadley’s narrative are attempted realisms rather than just filler.
Hadley can be critical and biting — in a good way. Sheila, working in a factory despite her degree because ‘other people have to’, is a character Hadley perhaps dislikes. She supports her boyfriend Neil’s academic career despite being academically stronger than him and despite him not getting up until lunch time (we are told this disapprovingly). When he begins being openly unfaithful to her, she doesn’t think it liberal to mind: ‘— Isn’t that bourgeois morality? she said’. These commune scenes are the closest the book comes to satire; we’re clearly meant to ridicule Sheila and detest the various hypocrisies undercutting the political views.
The narrative is poised and coolly ironic, too, on male violence: ‘People had mixed feelings about it: it was disgusting, but it was also, confusedly, part of the suffering essence of maleness…’ In the aftermath of Uncle Derek murdering his son, Stella notes that ‘presumably the implication of the case was that Auntie Andy had driven her husband to murder out of sexual frustration […] Who knows how Uncle Derek would have fared in court if he’d killed Auntie Andy?’ Later, though, we meet the misogynistic Andrew, who sounds like he’s read Andrea Dworkin: ‘It’s biological. There’s nothing you feminists can do about it. You can tinker around with all the rest but you can’t change the shape of fucking, where you need me to overwhelm you. Don’t you?’ Instead of being revolted and running away, Stella thinks that this ‘seems unanswerably true’, and then ends up sleeping with Andrew in what at first seems like a rape scene. She then appears (through an ‘also’) to allude back to her earlier recounting of Valentine: ‘Of course, this way of telling the story — this stuff about the darkness — is also a romance, a dangerous romance.’
All told, this is a reflective and ambitious novel from a solid writer, but it lacks something. Perhaps the problem it’s dramatizing — that ‘dangerous romance’ can overwhelm reality — can only be presented falsely.
Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99)
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