Alone With a Book by Tessa Hadley review – an acclaimed writer’s cultural prescription

When Tessa Hadley was a child, someone gave her a copy of Lois Lenski’s Papa Small, which follows Mr Small and his family through a typical week. Papa Small goes to work, Mama Small cooks the supper, and the small Smalls dry and put away the dishes. “I thrilled to its ordinariness,” writes Hadley, a novelist known for her depictions of the ordinary that are anything but. In all her novels and short stories, she’s spectacularly alive to the everyday, both the seemingly humdrum surfaces and the darkest emotional depths.

So you know what you’re in for when you reach for a book by Hadley, which is why I was in equal parts excited and apprehensive about her first foray into nonfiction. At least, it’s her first in bound form: Alone With a Book comprises published essays written since 2000. A nimble mix of biography, cultural criticism and personal reflection, it traces her development as both a reader and a writer, and burrows into the literary and artistic works that have kept her company along the way. For fans, it’s a fascinating insight into how and why she became the beloved author she is. For the rest, it’s a first-class reading (and picture) list.

Hadley was a bookish child. Plain and “physically inept”, she felt more at home curled up in the corner of a library than hanging off the bars of a climbing frame. Her father was a teacher and jazz trumpeter, her mother a housewife and occasional dressmaker. On the walls of her childhood home were prints by Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Maurice Utrillo. Hadley’s brother, Tom, went on to become a scholar of Renaissance art, forever squabbling with their mother, who at art school had learned to think of everything pre-impressionist as “academic and stuffy”. “Mum and Dad’s feeling for books trailed well behind their interests in music and the visual arts, so that I never felt the burden of their judgment, for which I’m grateful.”

For a long time, writing felt to Hadley like a form of failure: “I was a slow developer and too impressionable, too ready to take on the colouration of whatever I was absorbed in.” It was only when she found Alice Munro in the late 1980s, by which point she was in her early 30s, a wife and a mother, that she began to understand there might be ways to write about “the small ordinary things I was expert in, instead of trying to know what other people knew”.

There are two essays on Munro in Alone With a Book, and more on other writers Hadley considers her “intimates” – Anne Tyler (“indefatigably inventive”), Elizabeth Bowen (“better than Woolf”), Anita Brookner (“What a confessional writer she is!”). Hadley as critic is as passionate as she is shrewd: her only quibble with Ferdinand Mount’s excellent English Voices is directed at his essay on Germaine Greer “not because he isn’t right about some of her contradictions, but because he can’t quite keep ‘Calm down dear’ out of his tone”; Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone is “the seminal 1960s feminist novel that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is always supposed to be”.

Now and then I found myself yearning to be nose-deep in a Hadley novel, rather than reading her thoughts on others’ work. But there’s comfort to be found in seeing a writer so seasoned, so talented, still reading, still learning. The section on art is brilliant, albeit brief, and although Hadley doubts herself – she’s aware “how my eye is untrained, careless of the visual construction, too quick to move to the contents of what’s narrated” – her way of looking at paintings is witty and fresh. Here she is on Félix Vallotton’s portrait of his wife Gabrielle sitting calmly in a chair while her baby niece rips up a piece of paper on the floor: “Is Vallotton perturbed by how his wife is smiling and fatalistic, overseeing the destruction of something so closely resembling his own work?”

It’s curious that two of the four artworks she writes about are religious in theme – and yet, as she points out, Christian stories have “shaped our aesthetic and moral imagination at levels so deep we’re mostly unconscious of it”. During the pandemic, when she was sheltering apart from her sons (she has three, as well as three stepsons), she found herself drawn to The Coronation of the Virgin by Jacopo di Cione, “a grave and golden reverberation in my thought”. In this political moment, she finds herself “seeking out certain images of cruelty in art, as if I need to look straight at it and into it”. Cue Giovanni Bellini’s The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr.

As a child, Hadley shunned certain of Grimms’ fairytales because “they were too terrible”. Terrible things happen in her stories too – things to do with thwarted ambitions, adultery and ageing – amid the gentle, persistent patterns of daily life. Here, she makes a compelling case for keeping books and art close in both good times and bad, and (in the right hands) for the “powerful magic” of domestic realism.