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Summary
Summary
An indelible story of one woman's life, revealed in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain's leading literary lights--Tessa Hadley.
"Clever Girl is...what could be called a 'sensibility' novel--a story that doesn't overreach, about a character who feels real, told in prose that isn't ornate yet is startlingly exact. The effect is a fine and well-chosen pileup of experiences that gather meaning and power."--Meg Wolitzer, New York Times Book Review
Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an Englishwoman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley's involving and moving novel follows Stella from childhood, growing up with her single mother in a Bristol bedsit, into the murky waters of middle age. It is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama--violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances.
Yet it is Hadley's observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another that elevate this tale into "a beautiful and precisely drawn portrait of an everywoman, both extraordinary and ordinary" (Minneapolis Star Tribune).
Author Notes
Tessa Hadley teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University College in Cardiff, Wales.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hadley's (The London Train) latest is told from the point of view of Stella, a lower-middle-class British girl born in the 1950s, whose experiences coming of age mirror the broader cultural development of her times. The child of divorced parents, Stella is clever in school and seems destined to go on to a university. But after being abandoned by a boyfriend and discovering she is pregnant (her son, Luke, eventually goes on to be a teacher), Stella's life takes a series of left turns. While working as a waitress, she falls in with a group of art students, and eventually goes to live in their commune, where she gets pregnant again by a new boyfriend who's tragically killed before the baby is born. After a dispiriting stint as a married businessman's mistress, Stella returns to school and resumes the trajectory of her waylaid life. The simplicity of its story is one of this novel's great strengths: the uncluttered plot allows for Stella's pains, humiliations, and instances of self-discovery to be confidently inhabited and rendered with emotional precision. Looking back over her life, Stella can be wistful about people and places ("Sometimes I'm nostalgic for that old intricate decay, as if it was a vanished subtler style"), but tellingly, she is often at a loss to explain or precisely remember her motivations, "as if a switch flicked between two versions of myself, I suddenly wasn't all right." In the end, this carefully wrought novel transcends mere character study, offering up Stella's story as a portrait of how accidents and happenstance can cohere into a life. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
A middle-aged woman relates her life story from the 1960s to the present, a coming-of-age, after age, after age story, as she evolves into womanhood in the UK. Bright and industrious, a mother at an early age, Stella is filled with unresolved fury and rebellion. She is always most gratified when situations or people save her from herself. Dramatic and realistic, Stella's story includes violent deaths, failed affairs, and broken hearts. The book is not so much about what she chooses in her life as it is about how she lives out what befalls her. A uniquely gifted writer, Hadley (Married Love), never vague, possesses a narrative voice that moves the characters through their phases with parenthetic irony. Like an artist dabbing in precise luminous details, she has a masterly grasp of pivotal moments and renders them with brilliant economy. VERDICT This is an absorbing work, sure to appeal to readers who are in touch with their own inner voices. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/13.]-Joyce Townsend, -Pittsburg, CA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.