The Past (Hadley)

The Past
Tessa Hadley, 2016
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062270412


Summary
Three sisters and a brother, complete with children, a new wife, and an ex-boyfriend’s son, descend on their grandparents' dilapidated old home in the Somerset countryside for a final summer holiday.

Simmering tensions and secrets rise to the surface over three long, hot weeks.The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past—their mother took them there to live when she left their father—but now, they may have to sell it. And beneath the idyllic pastoral surface lie tensions.

Sophisticated and sleek, Roland’s new wife (his third) arouses his sisters’ jealousies and insecurities. Kasim, the twenty-year-old son of Alice’s ex-boyfriend, becomes enchanted with Molly, Roland’s sixteen-year-old daughter. Fran’s young children make an unsettling discovery in an abandoned cottage in the woods that shatters their innocence.

Passion erupts where it’s least expected, leveling the quiet self-possession of Harriet, the eldest sister. As the family’s stories and silences intertwine, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life—bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican—winds down to its inevitable end.

Over five novels and two collections of stories, Tessa Hadley has earned a reputation as a fiction writer of remarkable gifts. She brings all of her considerable skill to The Past, a work of breathtaking scope and beauty—her most ambitious and accomplished novel yet. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 28, 1956
• Where—Bristol, England, UK
• Education—B.A.,  Cambridge University
• Currently—lives in London, England


Tessa Hadley is a British author born and raised in Bristol, England. Her father was a teacher who loved jazz, and her mother, a homemaker who loved painting. Her family was not devoid of literary chops: Hadley's uncle is the noted London playwright Peter Nichols.

As a girl, Tessa read extensively. She studied literature at Cambridge, which she found a "chilly, funny, odd place. Nursing idealistic dreams of changing lives, she decided to become a teacher.

It was a complete disaster. I was 23. I went to a rough comprehensive. I was political: I wanted to bring light where there was darkness. All that rubbish. I was hopeless. The kids ran rings around me. I cried on my way to school every morning.

Her misfortunes as a teacher sapped Hadley of her confidence to become an author. Additionally, two other major life events took over: marriage and children. Having attempted a book early on, it took another 23 years, plus three children and three stepchildren, before publishing her first novel in 2002. That book, Accidents in the Home, was longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award.

In addition to six novels (see below) she has two volumes of short stories, both of which were New York Times Notable Books. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker.

Hadley lives in London.

Books
2002 - Accidents in the Home
2003 - Everything Will Be All Right
2007 - The Master Bedroom
2007 - Sunstroke: and Other Stories
2011 - The London Train
2012 - Married Love: and Other Stories
2013 - Clever Girl
2016 - The Past
2018 - Late in the Day
(Author bio adapted from interview in the Independent, 5/25/2013, and from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Hadley is adept at delineating the Cranes' brand of cultured middle-class Britishness in all its generational mutations.... The Past offers a contemporary variant on the pastoral idyll. Hadley's evocation of Kington's Arthur Rackham-like tangle of mossy woods and slippery brooks is deliciously precise, as is her charting of the cultural implications of the area's recent upgrade from poor farmland to gentrified vacation spot…But even as we come to understand why Kington has such a deep psychological pull over the Crane children, we are shown how Britain's enduring class divisions ensure that they remain outsiders in this place.... Hadley's many fans will welcome this solid addition to her continuing narrative of how brainy women and blundering men negotiate the slippery class and sex wars of modern-day Britain.
Fernanda Eberstadt - New York Times Book Review


Hadley should be a bestseller rather than literary fiction’s best kept secret…. [She] is an exquisite writer, a writer’s writer, with a fine eye for detail and a way of crafting sentences that stop and make you inhale.
London Times


Exquisite…. For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures. Like those North American masters of the domestic realm, Hadley crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural.... Extraordinary.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


I finished The Past sadly—why did it have to end?—with a sense that I had understood something profound about both Hadley’s characters, and my own life. Many readers will, I suspect, in the presence of this exhilarating novel feel the same.
Boston Globe


Hadley glides like a familiar spirit through the rooms of the house and the perspectives of her characters…. Her novels have a moral spaciousness that gives their ordinary settings and conflicts a philosophical range.... The Past shows Ms. Hadley’s gifts in fine fettle.
Wall Street Journal


Hadley’s formidable storytelling talent and compassionate understanding of humanity pull us right into this beautifully told narrative…. A memorable novel that continues to resonate well after the reader has turned the last page, and makes us long for the next work of fiction by this outstanding English writer.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


Each player... is so distinct, so warmly dimensional you soon feel you know them as well as they know each other. This alone... is a marvel. More marvelous still is Hadley’s seamless, steady control, moving individual and collective stories forward and backward in time — a splendid work.
San Francisco Chronicle


[An] expertly wrought depiction of family life. Hadley’s arresting descriptions of the physical and emotional landscape, and her tender approach to love, lust and, crucially, the passing of time underline her reputation as one of the UK’s finest contemporary novelists.
Financial Times (UK)


Masterly….When it comes to domestic drama Hadley is without rival, and here her considerable talent is poured into an astonishingly astute grasp of ‘the sheer irritation and perplexity of family coexistence,
Independent (UK)


A new Tessa Hadley novel is a pleasure to be savoured. In her five novels and two collections of stories, Hadley has matched the psychological insight of Henry James with the sharp dialogue of Elizabeth Bowen.... A hugely enjoyable and keenly intelligent novel, brimming with the vitality of unruly desire.
Daily Telegraph (UK)


Tessa Hadley has become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them.
Guardian (UK)


Hadley’s beautifully composed new novel... recalls Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris in its dovetailing story lines, but the author’s genius for the thorny comforts of family... are entirely her own.
Vogue


Not much happens in this sixth novel from Hadley, yet even its most quotidian events seem bathed in meaning and consequence. Set exclusively on the rambling grounds of a crumbling English cottage estate, the story follows four middle-aged siblings.... This is familial drama at its best—unabashedly ordinary yet undoubtedly captivating
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) A fresh take on a familiar story of fractious family reunions where old resentments resurface, new alliances form, and long-buried secrets are uncovered. A great read whether at the cottage or just dreaming of one. —Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Library Journal


Placing fraught family relationships under the microscope, Hadley, wise and discerning, offers a subtle-yet-bold examination of complex emotional subtexts that have the power to bring kin together or destroy the bonds that would otherwise unite them.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [A] quietly masterful domestic portrait.... Broken up into three dreamy sections—two in the present and one set in the same house a generation earlier—the novel might seem overly precious if it weren't so bracingly precise. Hadley is the patron saint of ordinary lives; her trademark empathy and sharp insight are out in force here.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Past...then take off on your own:

1. Talk about the book's title and the role the past plays in the adult Crane siblings' lives. Can any of us escape the hold that the past has on our lives? Can the Crane family?

2. Why does Kington have such a deep psychological pull over the Crane children?

3. Describe each of the four Crane siblings: Harriet, Alice, Fran, and Roland. How are their lives portrayed by Tessa Hadley? Whom do you find most sympathetic and whom least?

4. Why do Roland's sisters continue to dismiss him, even see him as "slightly ridiculous," when he has so obviously made a success of his life? Is their treatment of him a fair assessment or simply mean spirited?

5. Both Pilar and Kasim are "outsiders" when it comes to British society. How does the author use them to reflect both the "archetypally English" scene, as well as each of the Crane siblings? What different perspective do they bring to the story?

6. What role does class—or class division—play in this novel? What affect does it have on the Crane family, both in the present and the past?

7. Using the rural setting of Kington, Hadley hearkens back to an ancient literary form, the "pastoral," a form that incorporates erotic encounters—the mythical god Pan who pursues wood nymphs and shepherdesses, for one. Talk about the ways sexual desire plays out in this novel.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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