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Free Love
By Tessa Hadley
Literary Fiction
Harper
A beautiful evening, a beautiful woman preparing herself for a beautiful dinner in a beautiful English suburb in 1967 -- Tessa Hadley sets the stage for a novel that shows how everything brittle cracked and everyone had a chance to become their own true selves during the revolution that swept through this seemingly perfect world.
In the novel, Free Love, the woman, Phyllis Fischer, is a 40-year-old Mrs. Dalloway with a husband and two children. Everything is just so; she has worked hard to make it that way because that is what she is supposed to do. The scene is set as an idyll:
Life flowed into the room from beyond the window in its drowsy suburban evening stream: the steady relieving splash of a hose in a herbaceous border, confiding clack of shears, distant thwack of balls from the tennis club, broken sharp cries of children playing, fragrance of cut grass and roasting meat, jiggling of ice in the first weekend gin and tonics.
Even "her dress for this evening waited like a friend".
Phyllis takes pride in what she has accomplished, but it is obvious there is something missing:
In all that stillness one pulse was racing: hers. Her life was passing, passing.
Dinner will not be a dinner party, even though she has taken great care with the food and her costume. The son of old friends is coming. Phyllis is certain Nicky Peters will be as much a bore tonight as he was when they met once in his boyhood.
Meanwhile, Nicky doesn't want to attend a stodgy dinner with stodgy friends of his stodgy parents. He is getting sloshed at a pub instead, wondering if he can escape the entire evening. He shows up an hour late, obviously more than one pint in, and is most inconsiderate and rude. Phyllis's husband, Roger, who works in the Foreign Office, brushes aside Nicky's obvious attempts to be a rude boor. Their teenage daughter, Colette, is at an awkward stage and is as contemptuous of Nicky as Nicky is of all of them. Their young son, Hugh, is glad to not have to attend because of his age; he would rather not share his mother's company at all anyway.
But before the story threatens to undo itself with trivial domestic drama, Hadley throws serious ideas into their dinner conversation. For example, Nicky tried to do some writing while in Iran and Afghanistan, but realized that "I didn't know what those people were thinking. So there was only me on every page, thinking about them: that was fairly sickening."
Nicky also is quick to stand up for not being a member of the Greatest Generation (even if it wasn't called that yet):
-- I suppose you think, Nicky went on, -- that we'll never be heroes, because we'll never be tested in the way you were. But we don't want to be. At least I don't. I'm happy to come clean: I'd fail every test you want to put to me. And I don't care. I'm a coward and I glory in it. A world built by cowards would be a better place. We could all sleep in peace and read our books.
It's about this time that I begin to wonder if a bookcase is going to fall on Nicky, like Leonard Bast.
Before an argument can break out at the table, a neighbor phones and demands that Phyllis go out in the dark, to another neighbor's yard, to rescue a child's sandal thrown into a pond. It is during this errand that Phyllis and Nicky suddenly kiss.
And everything changes in every character's world.
Hadley gloriously conveys what it is like to be in the throes of passion, to wonder if one will be able to breathe properly if one cannot be with the beloved. But woven throughout even this aspect of the story are the various strands of cultural and political explorations. Wondering if one is a Marxist or a traditionalist or nothing at all is as tied to the Britain throwing off the constraints of post-war gloom as experimenting with pot or sex.
There are characters who change and grow, who become their best selves with acquired wisdom and depth. There are characters who realize they should let someone go, and characters who realize they never should have let someone go. Some of these characters are the same character. There are characters who harden their hearts and a reader's heart can ache for them.
Later in the novel, a shoe drops in the plot about connections. At first it seems an odd choice by the author. Then the other shoe drops, and the plot takes on the overtones of an Oscar Wilde play. A reader does not have to be concerned about disbelief remaining suspended to remain invested in how the characters react to the plot points. The characters remain who they are, and that results in a rewarding reading experience. It's been some time since I was book drunk with falling into a novel, but that is what happened with Free Love.
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