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    Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel
    Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel
    Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel
    Ebook390 pages6 hours

    Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel

    By Tessa Hadley

    3.5/5

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    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 1, 2004
    ISBN9781466829558
    Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for Everything Will Be All Right

    3.5/5

    12 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      In 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.
    • 2/5
      fnbvxM Up qe
    • 3/5
      vbg
    • 3/5
      Fantastic
    • 3/5
      Aime le livre
    • 3/5
      A 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.
    • 1/5
      I 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

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