New novel is less than all right

February 15, 2004|Globe Correspondent

EverythingWill Be All Right

By Tessa Hadley

Holt, 303 pp., $24

Tessa Hadley's acclaimed first novel, "Accidents in the Home," was the stylish and compelling portrait of a frowzy British family in the throes of various mishaps and miscalculations. It was sad yet hilarious, quietly suspenseful, and expertly constructed. Looking back on it from a distance of over a year, readers might still see the harried Clare and her grubby children, the earnest husband, the rainstorm, the ruined car. We remember the unexpected twists like Clare's aborted affair and her funny conversations with her enviable, or was it envious, single friend, Helly. On top of that, we remember the author's amused intelligence, which puts her work in the company of that by Carol Shields and Doris Lessing.

Looking back on Hadley's new novel from a distance of less than a week is an entirely different exercise. Mostly I remember riffling through the densely written pages in search of anything that doesn't read like notes, character sketches, summarized scenes, and undigested ideas for the entertaining book that never got written.

According to the jacket copy, "Everything Will Be All Right" spans "five decades of extraordinary change in women's lives" and explores "the complicated relationships of one family." I guess this is safe enough: Aunt Vera, a teacher; Lil, a widowed mother; Lil's daughter, Joyce, a resourceful housewife and entrepreneur; Joyce's daughter, Zoe, a college professor studying arms trading and the nuclear age; and Zoe's daughter, Pearl, do make five, while the changes in many women's lives between the late 1940s and 2002 have arguably been extraordinary. The jacket copy goes on to call this novel "intricate, insightful, and poignant." Well, if the page after page of summarized scene and exhaustively conceived character were to find their way into an actual flesh-and-blood story, then that statement would likely be true as well.