Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel
By Tessa Hadley
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
The profoundly different choices of a mother and her daughter infuse this rich, expansive novel with both intimate detail and wide resonance
When Joyce Stevenson is thirteen, her family moves to the south of England to live with their aunt Vera. Joyce's mother, Lil, is a widow; Vera has a husband who keeps his suits in the wardrobe but spends evenings at another house nearby. While the two sisters couldn't be more different-Vera, a teacher, has unquestioning belief in the powers of education and reason; Lil puts her faith in séances-they work together to form a tight-knit family.
Joyce sees that there is something missing in their lives: men. She doesn't want to end up like her aunt Vera, rejected by her husband. Joyce discovers art at school: she falls in love with the Impressionists and, eventually, with one of her teachers. In spite of the temptations of the sixties, she is determined to make her marriage and motherhood a success. When Joyce's daughter, Zoe, grows up and has a baby of her own, however, she proves to be impatient with domestic life and chooses a dramatically different path.
Spanning five decades of extraordinary changes in women's lives, Everything Will Be All Right explores the complicated relationships of a family. The young ones of each generation are sure that they can correct the mistakes of their parents; the truth, of course, is more opaque. Intricate and insightful, Everything Will Be All Right firmly establishes Tessa Hadley among the great contemporary observers of the human mind and heart.
Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, as well as three short story collections, most recently Bad Dreams and Other Stories, which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker; in 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She lives in London.
Read more from Tessa Hadley
Married Love: And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Free Love: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Clever Girl: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bad Dreams and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sunstroke and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Accidents in the Home: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Related to Everything Will Be All Right
Related ebooks
Accidents in the Home: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sunstroke and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5America Was Hard to Find: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Birds of America: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Kind: A Novel in Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Disturbances in the Field: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Into the Valley: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hamilton Stark Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summer Light Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Silver: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTwilight Sleep Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Past: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letty Fox: Her Luck Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Swimming Home: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Private Means: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Vodka: Ten Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Young Skins: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Liars and Saints: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nora Webster: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mysteries Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLove and Friendship: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Little Hotel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHer Here Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything I Don't Remember: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Suzanne Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFamily Pictures: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Festival of Earthly Delights Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Solace: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Living on Air: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Literary Fiction For You
A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prophet Song: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Queen's Gambit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tender Is the Flesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Salvage the Bones: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If We Were Villains: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Camp Zero: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Nigerwife: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Everything Will Be All Right
12 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In this early novel, Hadley's usual beautifully written and cuttingly observed detailing of ordinary lives lacks the punch of some of her later works, but its still a pleasure to read.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5fnbvxM Up qe
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5vbg
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fantastic
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Aime le livre
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A novel that spans more than fifty years of lived experience, unless it is bound to a singular protagonist, will need to focus on first one individual and then another and then another. Who the author chooses to put principally in our gaze becomes as significant, at times, as what they end up saying and doing. Here, Tessa Hadley traces a line through a series of women, mother to daughter, through four generations. But of course over that many generations there will also be a host of other candidates, in this case also mostly women, who might have been equally worthy of further attention. And likewise there will be themes that take on the centre stage while others just as enticing wait patiently off-stage. Sometimes these choices will coalesce into a tightly wound cord of character, action, and theme. Sometimes these choices will result in a diffuse sprawl. The latter is the case in this novel. The question is whether a bit of sprawl is a weakness in itself, especially if, as might be hinted here, life itself just does tend towards sprawl.The women catching Tessa Hadley’s eye begin with Lil, whose husband died on the beaches during the disaster that was Dunkirk. Lil’s oldest daughter, Joyce, the picks up the author’s gaze when she is a teenager, eventually heading off to art college and marrying one of her drawing instructors. Joyce’s daughter, Zoe, takes over for a time until we end up with Zoe’s daughter, Pearl. Each of these women has different aspirations and inclinations. They tend towards a fierce intelligence that emerges in varying forms. And although they have very different temperaments, there is an inescapable sense of sameness across them. A bit Radio 4? A bit Women’s Hour? Perhaps it’s just the curse of living in a thoroughly moderated and modulated class-bound society. How could they hope to be distinctive? And that raises a slight problem, because the women in the larger tale who really are distinctive, such as Lil’s sister Vera, are shunted off to the sidelines. Or at least it seems that way.And how do the men fair in such a novel? Not well. Not well, at all. Across the generations, it seems like Lil, whose husband dies at Dunkirk, has just about the best that can be hoped for from a man. Even the one relationship that persists, between Joyce and Ray, shows Ray as overbearing and egotistical and, frankly, insufferable. One rather wishes that he could have met his Dunkirk as well. And that goes double for Zoe’s partner, Simon. But the one who tops them all is Vera’s husband, Dick, who totally lives up to his name.It doesn’t sound like a recipe for a thoroughly engrossing novel, does it? And yet, I found it so. It is variable, certainly. At times the tone and level of seriousness switches into a different key, if you will, without seeming to want to sustain it. But overall it remains a colourful canvas of women, the choices some of them make, and the consequences of those choices.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I have just finished reading Tessa Hadley's Everythings will be All Right. Oh I do wish it would have been. Even though there were sentences and expressions within, which I found to be very insightful, I found the whole experience of reading the book a terrible chore.It basically was the life history of three generations of women, seen through their eyes. Their life's were full of self-inflicted grief, and it really was an account of how they got themselves into scrapes and out again, mostly involving men, and a baby thrown in for good measure (not to mention the death from meningitus). It isn't a book I would recommend, I only finished it because I set myself the task, which felt more like hard labour, and because I met the author, who I found very interesting, unlike her tale - which appears was loosely biographical tales from her family. I also took it's promise on the cover at face value... "Everything will be alright" - well I wished it had been, but unfortunately it wasn't. Shani 21.09.06
Book preview
Everything Will Be All Right - Tessa Hadley
One
After the end of the war, when she turned eleven, Joyce Stevenson won a scholarship to Gateshead Grammar; she was one of the top forty children in her year. Two years later, when they moved south to live with her Aunt Vera, her Uncle Dick arranged to have her scholarship transferred to Amery-James High School for Girls, which was in an elegant eighteenth-century house in the city. New classrooms and laboratories and a gym had been added to the old building. The girls and the life there were subtly, complicatedly different from the children and the life Joyce and her sister Ann had known before; this had to do, they quickly understood, with a whole deep mystery of difference between the South and the North, in which their family was peculiarly entangled.
The Amery-James girls had a kind of sheen to them; their hair seemed glossier and their skin had a fresher bloom, their movements were slower and more measured. Joyce and Ann missed the boys and the men teachers. You had to watch your tongue, to hold back on some of the quick smart joking things you might have said in the North, because here what counted for glamour and importance was rather a kind of restraint and a collective know-how, knowing when it was the right season for French-skipping and cat’s cradle, knowing when these things were suddenly childish, knowing how to wear your purse belt so that it didn’t bunch up your skirt around the waist, knowing when to speak and when not to, and how to speak. There were a few girls there who had the city accent, comical and yokel-ish. You did not want, not even by default, to be counted among them. So Joyce and Ann determinedly set about losing the accents they had grown up with, never actually commenting to each other or to anyone on what they were doing, losing them until no trace was left and they no longer sounded like their mother or their aunt and uncle or their left-behind grandparents in the North.
The big old gray house they rented from the Port Authority was eight or so miles outside the city. At first their Uncle Dick drove them every morning in his car into Farmouth, the residential area behind the Docks where he worked, and they caught a bus from there into town. Then their Aunt Vera got a job teaching history at Amery-James. The girls had known, vaguely, that she had been a teacher before she married and had children, but had not imagined this was something you would ever pick up again later. It seemed incongruous (most of the teachers at the school were Miss, not Mrs.) and potentially an embarrassing pitfall, some mistake Aunt Vera had made in reading the signals of what was acceptable and appropriate.
Now Aunt Vera drove them in to school every morning, in the old Austin Seven that Uncle Dick bought her, which usually had to be started with a starting handle (Lil, their mother, sometimes came out and did it for Vera so she wouldn’t get oil on her teaching clothes). They asked to be let out some little distance from the school so they could walk the rest of the way without her. At least because their surnames were different, most of the girls never even connected Mrs. Trower to the Stevensons, and Aunt Vera never spoke to them any differently than to any of the others or gave any sign of their relationship inside school time. In fact, Joyce and Ann found that they could make for themselves a fairly effective separation between the Mrs. Trower who taught them history and Aunt Vera at home, closing off their knowledge of the one when they were dealing with the other. It was a relief that she turned out to be one of those teachers who elicited fear and respect rather than contempt. She was passionate about her subject, but that was tolerated as a kind of occupational hazard, with the same ambivalent tolerance that was extended to the brainy ones among the pupils. What was more important was that she was exacting and strict and could be scathingly sarcastic: Joyce more than once, and not without a certain private familial triumph then, saw her aunt reduce a girl to tears.
In the end-of-year revue they made fun of how, although she knew all the clauses of the Treaty of Vienna, the Trower-pot
never remembered where she’d put down her chalk. Some girl would be chosen to impersonate her who could look tall and imposing and oblivious as she did, and whose hair could be arranged to imitate how hers was always escaping in thick untidy strands from where it was pinned up behind. Joyce would assiduously shut out a picture of Aunt Vera in her dressing gown in the mornings, her worn-out gray-pink corset and brassiere strewn on the bed behind her in a tangle of bedclothes, wailing to Lil at her bedroom door through a mouthful of hairpins that her stocking had a