Hadley's Writing Style

It would be an overstatement to describe Tessa Hadley as a writer who flies in the face of fashion, but aspects of her career and her work might lead one in that direction. For a start, she has determinedly made her fictional arena the family, her setting the home and her sphere of engagement the relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children: despite their intricate imagery, delicately weighted prose and frequently wrong-footing moral complexity, her novels and short stories are often placed in the reductive category of "domestic fiction". She veers away from the jaw-dropping finale or the linguistic pyrotechnics towards unshowy description and the gradual but ambiguous revelation of character and circumstance. And her progress towards becoming a published writer was tentative, lengthy and edged with self-doubt, suggesting a reticence at odds with the brasher face of contemporary literature.

And yet this is all only part of the story. As we discuss her work in the house in Cardiff she has shared for many years with her husband, Eric, and their children, we immediately alight on the problematic issue of domestic fiction. It's a subject that she addresses in her new novel, The London Train, which contains a scene in which the protagonist, Paul, ponders the pile of novels by his wife's bed, books "that seemed to him pretty much interchangeable – what people called 'women's fiction'". When I ask her about those notional books and what they might represent, she becomes thoughtful: "It's such a hornet's nest, but absolutely fascinating to me as well: the whole thing that, if you're a woman, and you write about families and relationships, you have to do a bit of work to make sure people don't dismiss you. You have to place yourself, to say: 'These are thinking books.' I know exactly that man's perspective on that pile of books sitting by Elise's bed and he's partly right: quite a few of them will be a little bit formulaic, though perfectly intelligent. I think there's an interesting genre at the moment of perceptive, intelligent, literate and yet somehow samey books."

Hadley is acute when she expands on this theme, identifying "an enormous number of books set in a family, with a bit of dysfunction, somebody's miserable, or they're depressed, or it's all going wrong, and then the family get together and suddenly we go back inside the past, and something awful happened in the past, usually a child's death or something, and then we come back into the present, and it's healed the problem, and they all move on". But neither is she unsympathetic to that genre. In the second half of The London Train, we meet Cora, a woman who has abruptly left her husband and her job in London and buried herself in the Cardiff house she has recently inherited from her parents. Taking a job as a librarian, she finds herself devouring exactly the kind of books Hadley describes, in a sense anaesthetising herself against present pain.

The novel works, in part, by juxtaposing the academic, reflective Paul against the less highbrow concerns of his wife and of Cora, who was once his lover, but Hadley is insistent that there is no easily inferred value judgment: "I think, as a culture, we still anxiously hierarchise kinds of thinking, and that we put abstract, intellectual thinking above intuitive thinking in art; we somehow feel that, even if we're not completely enjoying them, novels that think overtly in their form, and force you into doing clever tricks in your head, should be placed on a scale above the novel that is drawing you in and offering you all the joys of illusionism, and making you think you're in that world and it's real. Both have their pitfalls and their dangers and both have their high delights when they're practised by a really good writer. "

What she herself is attempting falls somewhere between those two poles. In all of her five books, from her 2002 debut, Accidents in the Home, to The London Train, she adapts the conventions of writing about families and relationships to produce fiction that is strikingly ambivalent and difficult to pin down; reviewing her 2007 collection Sunstroke and Other Stories, Anne Enright noted: "Hadley, for all the felicity of her prose style, is an immensely subversive writer."

There is a good example of that subversion and ambivalence in her second novel, the generational saga Everything Will Be All Right. Zoe, a PhD student who has fallen in love with the unconventional, intellectual and uncaring Simon and had a baby, walks out on him and returns, exhausted and full of righteous anger, to her parents' house. We read that, falling asleep that night, "Zoe came all of a sudden to some deep, sad place, and knew she hadn't quite told her parents the truth about Simon. What she had said looked just like the truth, so that no one else but her would ever know the difference; but it wasn't the whole truth, she would need to start out all over again if she wanted to describe what he was actually like, in justice."

Truthfulness in writing is clearly an abiding preoccupation for Hadley, whether she's talking about her own work or about teaching creative writing, which she does at Bath Spa University. "I know that every story has a shorthand version, which is deeply unsatisfying and deeply not true," she says, and she describes one of the greatest challenges of writing as resisting "the inertia of language", a concept she came across in Henry James (the subject of her PhD thesis, which she adapted into her first book).

What one finds, as a consequence, in Hadley's fiction is a deceptively readable surface under which lie all sorts of equivocations and uncertainties. In The London Train, she explores a love affair from the different perspectives of Paul and Cora, creating a narrative that is not plainly contradictory but which suggests the existence of entirely different frames of reference. But, although Cora is the more obviously sympathetic character, Hadley explains that she wanted to access "a whole different tradition, both in novels and in life, that is perhaps more masculine, which is less kind, less bonding and generous, greedier, but also sometimes more audacious. And I think there's as much of Paul in me as there is of her, not in my behaviour and my life, but in my mind. I really enjoy inhabiting that male perspective – it's one of the things I wanted to do when I started the book, to write as a clever man, and it was very liberating to do it."

Hadley had to wait some time for the liberation that writing can bring. Having grown up in Bristol, she read English at Cambridge and then – "in a spirit of socialist rejection of the privileged elitism of Cambridge, taking literature to the people" – she decided to become a teacher. Despite loving her training – she was taught by Eric, with whom she began a relationship – she hated teaching and describes herself as "hopeless"; her natural indolence and need for privacy, she says, were quite at odds with the need to perform daily in front of a classroom of unruly children. "Here I was bringing them my flowers," she laughs now, "opening culture up to them, and of course they were just naughty." By the time they had turned all the lights off in the drama studio and left her "shouting into the dark", she had worked out that school life was not for her.

In her early 20s, Hadley had the first of her three sons. She was so put off the idea of a career that she happily stayed at home and brought them up. For mental stimulation, she taught extramural evening classes, reinforcing her belief that literature should not be a "closed shop". But she also started writing, completing three or four novels – she can't remember how many – over the course of several years, sending them to publishers, getting "nice" rejection letters and then putting them away. If they still exist, she says, it's only because she's too untidy to have thrown them away: "They were useless, they were no good."

Why, then, did she persevere? "At some early stage, something takes hold of you and you feel that, unless you can write, or paint, or whatever, you will not be wholly alive. That's a most mad thing. It can't be genetic or biological – I don't know where it comes from – but it feels primary. I tried to stop many times because it made me miserable. That's a big failure." She thinks now that she might have been trying to write like other people (one novel was inspired by Brecht, another by Nadine Gordimer), but also that she was intellectually immature.

The breakthrough came – unexpectedly, because she confesses to having been highly sceptical in advance – when she enrolled in the MA class in creative writing at Bath Spa in 1993; it was bringing her writing "into a public forum", she says, that was the valuable part. She wrote "a better novel", but that too failed to find a publisher, so she did a PhD on Henry James and got taken on by the university as a teacher. Suddenly, she had a career, and in that unprecedented surge of activity – she had three young children, commuted regularly between Cardiff and Bristol and turned her PhD into a book – she wrote Accidents in the Home, which revolved around the relationship between two close female friends.

Although she says she wouldn't "unwish" what she calls "all those strange, quiet years", she also describes the process of finally becoming a writer in terms of finding her place in the world: "I felt as if, eventually, you find your own house and you let yourself in your front door, with your own key. Things can still go wrong, but it doesn't matter – you're there." When Accidents in the Home was well received – it got impressive reviews and was longlisted for the Guardian first book award – she knew that the most important thing was that she could keep on writing: "I was so hungry to write the next one and the next."

Everything Will Be All Right followed in 2004, a story of mothers and daughters that borrowed much from her own background and tapped into her love of family trees, and also broadened into an astute portrait of changing social mores and pressures. In 2007, she published Sunstroke and a third novel, The Master Bedroom, which like The London Train, features a female character who abandons her life in London and returns to Cardiff and to the remnants of her childhood. Bristol, although unnamed, has also featured in her writing, and she says she loves to write about medium-sized cities that are not London, to illustrate the attractions of a kind of provincial, bourgeois life.

She is also adept at conjuring up the confusions and misapprehensions of middle age, the time when it is still possible to make a fresh start, when the rush of early adulthood is past and when childhood has fallen so far behind that it seems like a different life altogether. Kate, the gilded, selfish heroine of The Master Bedroom, who begins an affair with a teenage boy when she returns to Cardiff to care for her elderly mother, and Paul, the errant husband in The London Train, are ruthless characters, but Hadley is rather fond of ruthlessness: "We need people who are ruthless, otherwise we're just all – I don't know what – perhaps bored! Or we don't test life to its extremes; we don't risk anything. I love having that energy, inside life and inside a book."

Hadley's short stories have frequently been published in the New Yorker and Granta, and her novels are often episodic and tightly sprung. Part of the business of trying to capture the truth of everyday life involves admitting its gaps and jumps in time, the little pockets that are inexplicable and unexamined. It's perhaps unsurprising that Alice Munro has been a major influence or that, or to learn that in her early years of writing, she used to read a few pages of Elizabeth Bowen before she sat down at her desk to ease her passage from domestic to creative life. "Fragmentary is what there is," she says, and she resists the temptation of a Dickensian-style wrapping-up of loose ends. At the moment, she is writing "another book, which seems to be coming as a succession of chapters that feel like stories", and which she refers to as the picaresque life story of a spiky, bold girl. Following that will come "a very novelly novel".

But whether she is writing short stories or novels, and despite the beauty of her finely detailed prose, Hadley is still very clear that she's a storyteller. "All that hard work of the sentences is labouring to render the story right," she says. "Story is so deep in our heritage – our evolutionary heritage – it's what binds people together; it's what interests us in each other; it's what we want to hear. So I'm happy to be read for the story." Accessing that story is a more complicated matter, and one that she concentrates on with her MA students at Bath Spa; she describes the process of encouraging people to turn inside themselves and allow themselves to be uneasy. "What you're writing should hurt and make you feel slightly anxious, and almost ashamed."

Hadley gives you the sense that, although she feels entirely at home with being a writer – "It was the only thing I was ever going to be any good at" – she is still beguiled by what she does and where it might lead her. If her novels sometimes trade in a sort of lyrical opacity, it is also possible that the lives that she depicts, with their shifting emotions and allegiances, their subtle realignment of desires and motives, are also opaque to her. To explore that hinterland, one feels, is what she thinks fiction is for and what it can achieve: "We are all dreaming children as we read. And as we write."