Clever Girl

Starred review from November 4, 2013
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.

December 1, 2013

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

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2013
One relatively ordinary life, chronicled from the 1950s to the 1990s in England, mirrors enormous shifts in style, attitude and choice, especially for women. Domesticity of many kinds--rich, poor, hippie, straight--forms the connective tissue in Hadley's (Married Love, 2012, etc.) fifth novel, narrated by Stella, a girl of her times. Growing up in the postwar decade without a father (Stella is told he has died, although that's not true), she experiences a childhood bound by convention and a shortage of cash. When her mother remarries, Stella finds herself in competition and conflict with her stepfather. But friends sustain her, notably Valentine, her soul mate, a boy with rebellious modern ideas and drugs. Sex only happens between them twice, but Stella falls pregnant and becomes a single mother herself, a choice which derails her hopes for college. Instead, she becomes a housekeeper, then moves into a commune and becomes pregnant again. This time, the father is unexpectedly killed. Stella is a caring mother yet a prickly character--suspicious, private, critical. Eventually, she does find some success. Yet life remains stormy, with new chapters continuing to open. Hadley is a fine, insightful writer, but this memoir of a restless, bookish woman coping with a sequence of variable male figures while playing the hand life has dealt her lacks momentum.

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December 1, 2013
Growing up in Bristol with a single mother, Stella first realizes she's clever when she solves a physics problem with sudden insight. Her cleverness seems confirmed when she and brilliant Valentine become inseparable in a life of the mind. But she's not clever enough to avoid becoming pregnant at 16, after having sex just twice with Val, who's left for America. When Stella's in the greatest need, her own hard work and the kindness of others help sustain her through motherhood, communal living, tragedy, affair, and marriage to the age of 50, when she understands that the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than the invisible turmoil of the inner life. . . . The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you. Hadley (Married Love, 2012) displays the keen insight and masterful portrayal of the domestic life for which she has become known. But this story of how narrator Stella lives out what befalls her is more likely to be admired for Hadley's sheer skill than embraced.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)