LITERARY FICTION
LATE IN THE DAY by Tessa Hadley
(HarperCollins €23.79) HADLEY’S latest is an oldfashioned Hampstead novel about the insular, complicated passions between two couples over 30 years.
Chris is an artist, her husband a second-generation Czech emigre, schoolteacher and failed poet. Her best friend Lydia does very little, and is married to Chris’s first boyfriend Zachary — an affable and very affluent art gallery owner who occasionally exhibits Chris’s work.
When Zachary dies unexpectedly in his 50s from a heart attack, latent desires between the remaining three split open the marital carapace.
These are privileged, gilded people who talk intelligently about art and politics over languid, delicious meals and seem always to be listening to exquisite music or standing in awe before a beautiful painting.
Hadley’s wisdom, however, and her shaded, exacting prose both expose and redeem her characters’ selfabsorption in a clever, compassionate novel that sings to the possibility of renewal in late middle-age.
ADELE by Leila Slimani
(Faber, €18.20) THE French-Moroccan novelist Leila Slimani likes to unearth the danger in the domestic: her headline-grabbing second novel Lullaby, published in 2016, wasn’t only about a nanny who murders two small children but, more subtly, about maternal ambivalence in a French middle-class family.
This, her superior first novel, centres on Adele, a Parisian wife, mother and half-arsed journalist who for years has sought oblivion and exhilaration in violent, vodka-fuelled one-night stands.
Her kind, trusting husband, a doctor, cares for her materially, but when he discovers what’s been going on he exacts revenge in a way that is both eminently reasonable and ruthless.
Adele is a modern-day Hedda Gabler, bucking furiously against the constraints of her life and, Slimani hints, a damaged childhood, yet lacking the imaginative capacity to find a way out that isn’t wholly destructive. It’s to the credit of this ferociously resonant novel that you simultaneously condemn Adele a bit for this, and weep for her, too.
WHERE REASONS END Yiyun Li
(Hamish Hamilton, €18.19) WHAT words do you use to go on living after your teenage son commits suicide?
The book’s narrator decides words are all she has, and so, reeling from Nikolai’s death, constructs in the following weeks a series of conversations with him, wherever he is. They retain the same intellectual vitality that defined their talks when he was alive.
Among the things they talk about (avoiding why he did what he did) is language itself, with Nikolai regularly taking his mother, an academic, to task for her clumsy use of metaphor.
She finds herself scouring the dictionary in search of the etymological provenance of horribly common words that for her are now emptied of meaning: grief, memory, suffering.
Li has written before in her memoir about the consolations of fiction during times of acute trauma, and this novel is a response to the death of her own son, Vincent, at the age of 16. The writing is unsentimental, brave and beautiful. An absolutely monumental book.