Clever Girl

by Tessa Hadley

Clever Girl is an indelible story of one woman’s life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain’s leading literary lights—Tessa Hadley—the author of the New York Times Notable Books Married Love and The London Train.

Like Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives—an ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art.

Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley’s moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age.

Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama—violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley’s observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, British Literature, Contemporary, Novels, Coming Of Age

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 2013

About the author

Tessa Hadley is the author of Sunstroke and Other Stories, and the novels The Past, Late in the Day and Clever Girl. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever is defined as intelligent, ingenious, insightful. It doesn't mean wise, showing good judgement. Stella, the narrator, is certainly clever but rarely wise. Through snapshots of her life, from childhood to middle age, we read how she faces the challenges of each stage of life.

This book is not for those readers who are attracted to compelling action plots but it is for those who love a well developed character, truthful insights, and beautiful prose. Although my life has been much more conventional than Stella's, I often remembered thinking similarly, knowing I would have done that or said that as a child or teenager, felt that as a mother of young children. Isn't that an indication of great writing?

I loved this flawed character with all her foibles, admirable qualities, and, yes, cleverness. I will soon be reading more books by Tessa Hadley.

[Suzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Clever Girl, which tells the story of Stella, a working class girl from Bristol, from her years as a child of a single mother through when she is about 50 and a mother herself. Her story, told in episodes, is a lovely, quiet character study. I did not want to say goodbye to her when the book ended! This blurb about the book says a lot of why I liked it:

"Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an Englishwoman named Stella. "

Stella's story demonstrates that, as a friend of mine likes to say, "life is curly, not lived in a straight line". She has many experiences that could have defeated her, but she just kept going, believing at some level that she truly was a "clever girl".

I had such a great feeling at the end of this book - it left me feeling optimistic. Highly recommended.

[Antonomasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

[or possibly 4.5] According to Harold Bloom, we read to be less lonely, as we can never know enough people. Clever Girl is a book so unusually like getting to know a real person that it fulfils this more than most do. It’s written as a novelistic narrative, not in a purely conversational style, but its directness and the way the narrator reveals her life story – most of it is there, though with gaps – feels inside so very much like listening, like company, like receiving email or letters rather than a book. (The use of dashes rather than quotation marks for dialogue also helps this effect.) It obviously belongs to the category “literary fiction” yet without making great effort to be different, has hardly any of the particular cliches which make me cringe when faced with another obvious example of litfic.

It’s a book that I can imagine some might find boring (it’s simple, someone’s life story in
pretty much chronological order) but I liked it instantly, starting like an early 60s kitchen-sink drama; Stella soon became someone I could imagine as an interesting older colleague or perhaps a friend of my aunt; technically young enough to be my considerably older sister, my mother’s child, and old enough that I could be her child. (It was still a surprise when she ended up as a late starter working in a field somewhat similar to my old work - an occupational therapist is someone who I occasionally might have ended up talking to about clients-in-common.) The romantic tales of 70s bohemiana in her late teens and early 20s, a bright person with an unconventional trajectory and politics I sympathised with, were my favourite - but the same sense of connection as you would feel with a real person you like always kept me interested in the bits I’d have been less keen on experiencing myself. There are enough similarities in the way we think about and experience certain things to give me a strong and relatively rare sense of click, but she’s different enough for me to vividly have the sense of “someone else” with all the differences and mysteries of that which are like being in the company of a real person not a made-up one. I couldn’t describe how it’s done, the creation of this perfect sense of realism without losing romanticism and nostalgia, but it’s a rare gift. My only doubts about giving it 5 stars were because of something Stella did and said near the end, but that’s as if I were marking a person on their opinions, not a book on how it’s written: the unusual effect of friendly realness here was for me 100%. And it was the sort of opinion too many people come to in that line of work – related to othering clients, service users or whatever your particular place calls them: we are okay and they are not, and any other people like them who we meet belong on the other side of a line. That’s still only a partial spoiler as I really, really wouldn’t have wanted to know the whole event it relates to before reading it, just because I felt like clicking on some online review.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look in the dictionary for the definition of “clever” and you’ll find these words: quick to understand or apply ideas…astute, intelligent, sharp.

So is Stella, the protagonist of Tessa Hadley’s novel, truly a clever girl? At one point, Stella answers that question herself: “In the wrong contexts, cleverness is just an inhibiting clumsiness.”

Stella is the type of girl who outsmarts herself; in a sense, she is the “everywoman” of the often chaotic sixties and seventies.” We meet her when she is only 10 and then, in shimmering vignettes, follow her until she is in middle age as she struggles against the boring existence of her mother and stepfather, flirts with feminism, deals with premature motherhood, gets involved in a couple of disastrous love affairs, and tries on and discards various “selves” as she tries on – and discards – various iterations of life in her quest to find the authentic one.

There is an intimacy in Stella’s recounting of her tales that made me think – more than once—that I was reading a memoir. A Bristol girl who makes some poor choices and who wrestles with failed affairs and missed chances does not, in any sense, add up to an extraordinary character. She could just as easily be you or me.

And yet. And yet. There’s something that’s truly extraordinary in the episodic telling. Tessa Hadley’s keen ability to capture an emotion, an interaction, or a juncture is so real that Stella could walk off the page. We believe in Stella and we also believe in her evolution, which sometimes comes in a crystal clear moment of enlightenment and other times in a hard-won battle for clarity.

Through the episodes that Ms. Hadley chooses to illuminate, we begin to see Stella coalesce into an integrated whole…and to trust in her cleverness. For readers who love character-driven books without lots of bells and whistles, this is a beautifully fulfilling read. 4.5 stars.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had been on my to-read list for several years and I was delighted to discover that an audiobook version was available on Hoopla via my local Library. The narrator, Esther Wane did a lovely job of telling the story. I enjoyed the gradual unfolding of Stella's life from birth to 50 and all the characters that form the big picture of her story. The writing was lovely.

Stand out quotes that had meaning for me:

"The murder had cleared a social space around Andy."

"I was the first to break the skin of the day."

"She had suffered a stroke. "A slight stroke," Mum said tidying it away." This reminds me of the term to 'sweep things under the carpet,' which refers to avoiding discomforting topics by hiding them away and carrying on with life as usual.

"That's all tyranny is. It's not in a personality, it's in a set of circumstances. It's being trapped with your enemy in a limited space, a country or a family, where the balance of power between you is unequal and the weaker one has no recourse."

"When you are young and strong you can be sure of springing free of your material envelope through your own vitality. Later, any dinginess or fussiness may seep back into you."

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Normally, I do not care for books that are short on dialogue and full of descriptive language or third person narrative, but I relished Clever Girl’s exquisite language and found myself underlining passage after passage. This novel is quiet but riveting.

Hadley’s novel is a 5-star treat for readers who enjoy a brilliant character study. Having not read any of Hadley's novels previously, I was blown away by her style: her deft use of language, her precision, her ability to use just a few sentences or even a handful of words to conjure up a vivid image in my mind.

I cannot list all the passages I underlined, but will relate just this is one: "But today I couldn't hear a sound in the house. I was the first to break the skin of the day, stepping out on the lino which struck its frozen cold up through the warm soles of my feet. When I parted the curtains and looked out, the familiar scrappy back landscape -- trellis and dustbins and old bikes and crazy-paving stepping stones -- was glazed in sunshine, gleaming from its dip into the night."

There's something that's truly extraordinary in the episodic telling. Tessa Hadley's keen ability to capture an emotion, an interaction, or a juncture is so real that Stella could have walked off the page. For readers who love character-driven books without lots of bells and whistles, this is a beautifully fulfilling read.

[Claire Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh why didn't this win all the prizes? I loved it. Beautiful writing, but it's the character of Stella that I enjoyed even more: fierce but self-contained, steady and powerful, loving and enduring. Some apparently find her cold, but I didn't - it was that she was dealt a certain hand in life and just had to get on with it.
It's about Stella's life from when she's about 13, I think, to her early 50s. Babies and work and tragedy and love, and life, really. The tragedies shook me and tore at my heart, like a good book should.
I think this might now be my favourite Hadley, pipping The Past to the post by a pipsqueak.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing is Wasted

Domestic Fiction. Not something that I had recognized as a separate genre until the London Sunday Times reviewer mentioned it on the back cover of this highly satisfying novel. The chronicle of ordinary lives. But I realize that it is something that I greatly enjoy, and a genre in which Tessa Hadley is an unassuming master. Looking back at my review of her recent story collection, Married Love, I noted that for Hadley the true story lies less in events than the ellipses between them, the way people move on with their lives, flawed or ordinary though they might be. While reading, I was aware (slightly apologetically) that this was not an "important" novel with grand themes, just small lives lived out of the limelight; four-star territory at most. But Hadley reminds you that even small lives can be lived large, and in this sense the novel is large indeed. In a touching scene at the end of the book, the heroine, an Englishwoman named Stella, revisits a childhood friend she hasn't seen for over thirty years; hearing his regrets, she is about to tell him that nothing is ever wasted. And for her it isn't, even though her life has taken many turns that she did not expect.

The novel traces Stella's life from 5 to 50. A lower-middle-class girl from Bristol, raised by a single mother, she goes through all the usual passages: childhood friendships, adolescent love, university, odd jobs and eventual profession, marriage, and motherhood—though not necessarily in that order. There is one moment fairly early in the book when you realize that the course of her expectations will be disrupted. For a moment, it seems arbitrary, almost a cliché. But then you realize that life itself is arbitrary, and that clichés only seem so because they occur so often. Time and again, Hadley brings Stella to the edge of a situation you think you have seen before, only to do something unexpected with it—not necessarily some startling twist, but unexpected simply because the course she takes is honest and uniquely hers. There are ten chapters; each starts with a little jump in time from the one before: a few months, a year, a decade. Ellipses, as I say. Hadley has no need to connect the dots; there might be some rich stories there too, but what she gives us is already enough to illuminate an ordinary but fully-dimensioned life. I am struck by her willingness to leave loose ends untied, but also by her ability to turn things around: a difficult marriage becoming a contented one, for instance.

It occurs to me that the domestic fiction genre is especially English. Perhaps there are some other practitioners like Alice Munro in Canada or the Swiss Peter Stamm, but the names that come to my mind are predominantly British: Penelope Lively, Margaret Foster, Maggie O'Farrell, even in some aspects Kate Atkinson. There is also a particular pleasure here for a British reader to return to familiar objects—Penguin bars, green wellies, a girl's hair the colour of conkers (chestnuts)—and past ages from the sixties into the new millennium. There is, for instance, a wonderful description of a cafe where Stella works, including "posters pinned to a noticeboard advertising yoga classes or feminist reading groups or political meetings." And through it all there is Hadley's quietly perfect language and powers of observation. So let me end with Stella as a child surprised to be the first to wake first in the house and venturing outside; the rest of her journey you can read for yourself:

But today I couldn't hear a sound in the house. I was the first to break the skin of the day, stepping out on the lino which struck its frozen cold up through the warm soles of my feet. When I parted the curtains and looked out, the familiar scrappy back landscape—trellis and dustbins and old bikes and crazy-paving stepping stones—was glazed in sunshine, gleaming from its dip into the night.

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fiction doesn't get better than this. This novel follows Stella from her childhood in England to her present day middle age. It's an exploration of relationships and class as well as dramatic incidents- tragic deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams. So well written that I'm sad it's over. " the highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived what befell you."

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quiet, deceptively simple novel about one woman’s journey through life: family upheaval, love, academia and unplanned motherhood. Brilliant despite (or because of?) its reticence.

In that its self-contained chapters at times seem to constitute a collection of linked stories, it brings to mind Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, which also plots a young woman’s course through discrete chapters. But if there is one book this reminds me most of, it is John Williams’s Stoner – the American campus novel (originally published in 1965) that became last year’s surprise bestseller. Like William Stoner, Stella is an ordinary person who takes delight in literature but remains disappointed by the course life has taken. Both novels share a gentle air of regret.

I suspect this is the kind of book that every person (not just every woman) should reread once a decade, to recognize new parts of the view and gain better hindsight on what it has all meant so far.

(See my full review at The Bookbag.)

[Laura McNeal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like one of those dreams where you know it's your house even though it looks nothing like your house. How does it feel to have a baby who doesn't sleep? Exactly like this. To believe in the holiness of an inanimate thing as a child? Like this. To cook and clean and love and hate? Like this. Beyond its immersive qualities, the book's appeal lies in the utterly convincing way that mistakes are quickly made, quickly resented, slowly accepted, and beautifully redeemed.

[Tonya · Rating 1 out of 5]

All the qualities that readers praised in The London Train are present in Clever Girl, Tessa Hadley's brilliant new novel. It follows the story of Stella, from her childhood as the daughter of a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s into the mysterious shallows of her middle age. The story is full of drama - violent deaths, an abrupt end to Stella's schooldays, two sons by different fathers who aren't around to see the boys grow up - but as ever it is her observation of ordinary lives, of the way men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles. Yes, you think. This is how it is.

Bored. Totally and completely bored. Run on after run on. I am not one for poetry -- Lots of the paragraphs started like -- that too. Just annoyed me. Maybe you are different, you like a bit more of a dreamy book and will enjoy it! I for one like " " and to know who MIGHT be talking and not have to re-read a sentence over and over to figure it out. Waste of time!

[Viera Némethová · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bystré dievča nie je ťažkým, intelektuálnym románom, v ktorom sa ťažoba života postáv prekrýva s poetikou rozprávania a opisom nepodstatných vecí, z ktorých sme pri čítaní nadšení a ktoré vyprchajú skôr ako príbeh samotný.
Tessa Hadley píše spôsobom, ktorý pripomína skôr rozprávanie dobrej kamarátky, skvelej rozprávačky počas cesty vlakom. Vety a kapitoly na seba plynulo nadväzujú, autorkino písanie je ľahkou rukou na klávesnici počítača.
"Ich forma" rozprávania poskytuje pri čítaní emocionálny dojem, že postava sa so všetkými skutočnosťami a twistami svojho života vyrovnala a nepateticky a bez vyciciavania emócií hovorí a ľuďoch okolo seba pokojne a s ľahkosťou.
Pri čítaní som sa ale prichytila, že je mi vlastne tak trocha jedno, kto je kto a akú úlohu zohráva v príbehu. To je jedna z nástrah čítania tato postavených kníh. Druhou je rýchlosť, akou príbeh z čitateľa vyprchá práve z dôvodu, ktoré som uviedla. Všetky dôležité zvraty sú v príbehu opísané akoby len pomimo, čo nedáva pri čítaní možnosť " zaháčikovať" sa do knihy hlbšie.

[Andrea Guy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to say Tessa Hadley's novel Clever Girl left me a bit befuddled. Stella seldom came across as a Clever Girl. In fact, many of her life decisions made me think she was more a foolish girl. She was a hard character to like and as the story progressed, though she showed signs of being "clever" she wasn't really.

I didn't like Stella, much at all. I wanted to warm to her, but she was just not someone I could really invest any emotion in. It is supposed to be a story about ordinary life, but it is really anything but. Stella is so messed up.Her family is so messed up and she just follows suit, only she has a brain. She could have been something early on, but she made so many mistakes, mistakes that ordinary people make, but somehow because they happen so often to her, it makes the ordinary, less ordinary.

So much of her life seemed to go back to her boyfriend from her teenage years, and when she gets to see him again, it is very anti-climatic.

I really had to plod my way through this one, which is a shame because the book was well written, it was just Stella.

It took me days to get through a book that only had 250 pages is not a good thing. I wanted to like this book so much, but it just didn't work out for me.

[M · Rating 1 out of 5]

What an interesting choice of title for a novel - and heroine - that are most decidedly not clever.
CG is about the trajectory of life of a woman who makes stupid choice after stupid choice, having two children from different fathers both of whom vanish and finally ending up with a man (who was married when she met him) who she goes on to intensely regret marrying. Three cheers for you. It was badly written and the overall plot was pointless.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most people lead ordinary lives, and their stories may not appear at first to be that fascinating to others. Stella is one of those people in Tessa Hadley's Clever Girl. Stella lived with her single mother in a city in 1960s England. Her mother told her that her father had died when Stella was a baby, but Stella learned that he had actually left them.

She was close to her mother, as it was just the two of them. That is, until the day Stella's mother remarries, and Stella gets a stepfather and then a baby brother. Stella does well in school, she is a clever girl, until she discovers boys and falls madly in love with Val. They spend all of their time together, but something is not quite right.

Stella makes one mistake that changes her entire life and future. Instead of graduating and going to university, Stella becomes pregnant, and Val heads off the United States to avoid trouble, not even knowing he will be a father.

Clever Girl realistically shows the difficulties of being an unwed mother, having a child so young. Stella and the baby move from her mother's home to stay with her aunt. I love this description of Stella at this time:
"I wasn't quite grateful enough; this was just a flaw in my character at that time in my life, I couldn't help seeing things bitterly, looking at everything-even kindness- with irony."
Stella ends up working and living at a boys boarding school. She leaves there to move in with Fred, an old teacher of Val's, who now teaches at the boarding school. From there she ends up living at a commune, having another baby.

She has two young sons to support and no good job prospects. She moves back in with Fred, who adores her sons. Stella's life suffocates her, and she takes to running away; she drops the boys off at her mother's, and then she runs away, not knowing when she will return.

Stella finally gets to be a clever girl when she goes to university. Like many older students, she focused on working hard and succeeding.
"It was such a relief to be clever at last. For years I had to keep my cleverness cramped and concealed- not because it was dangerous or forbidden but because it had no useful function my daily life."
We get to see Stella from childhood to middle-age and though she may be an ordinary person,
Hadley tells her story in such a compelling way as to make her life interesting to the reader. It took me awhile to appreciate Stella, but by the end of the novel, I truly did.

Clever Girl reminded me of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn and Alice McDermott's Someone, both in style and substance. All three of these celebrate the life of an ordinary woman, leading a quiet, yet ultimately meaningful life.

[Jenny]

DNF. Disappointing, but I was bored!

[Sheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this quite a bit and the unusually long time it took to finish should not reflect on the book (tech week this week and crisis at work has left me quite sleep deprived).

Stella is a clever girl and Hadley is a clever author; the novel follows Stella through the important (and momentous) points of her life. I did not like Hadley's foreshadow (others did) as I found it to remove the little suspense that is in the novel. Clearly, Stella ends up okay (or how can we have a retrospective book?) and I would have rather avoided all the "I'll tell you more about this later" or "well, the kids turned out okay".

Otherwise, though the novel is full of insights about relationships and Stella navigates the complex and ever changing world in an interesting period of history. I appreciated Hadley's wit and Stella's perseverance (although I would say that at times Stella is simply unusually lucky).

Hadley touches on feminism (and misogyny) in not-always subtle, but not over the top ways. All of the women are very dependent on the men (Stella herself even ends up in a marriage in which Mac has buckets of money to provide her with gluttonous shopping trips) financially, but the implication is that this shouldn't be so (Stella continues to work unnecessarily for some independence). The commentary about the times and the changing roles of women and men (both with the abuse suffered by Auntie Andy and her son and the attempt at the commune to share domestic chores) was historically relevant and highlights the interesting times: "The little despotism he installed the four walls of his home mattered only because it derived its authority from the whole towering, mahogany-coloured, tobacco-smelling, reasonable edifice of male superiority in the world outside." She also manages to give women the "silent but superior position" at times: "in her withholding and dismissive manner she seemed to communicate how women knew something prosaic and gritty and fundamental, underlying all the noise of men's talk and opinion."

Of course my favorite feminist/violent moment was Andrew's treatise on sex. "There's nothing you feminists can do about it. You can tinker around with all the rest buy you can't change the shape of fucking, where you need me to overwhelm you. Don't you? Unless you want a man to love you like a baby." Clearly, men and women can meet on equal ground (sexually or otherwise), but the aggressive understanding of the times and Andrew's total narcissism highlight the obstacles that were so structurally embedded and which early feminists faced. In more recent times (at least in Western culture), it is at least not politically correct to start from these positions.

There was also a point that cracked me up when Stella was taking her driving test. As she comes back she notices "Al was waiting for me outside the Test Centre when we got back--I caught one private glimpse of him before her saw us: abstracted, bored. Then he returned inside his smiling professional self. My husband and I had a flying instructor once who was always very happy and friendly. When asked how he can always be in such a good mood, Mike's response was "Once you learn to fake sincerity the rest is easy". As a customer service professional myself, I find these moments to be so funny...all the times at which we turn ourselves on for the customer.

Overall it is a great character piece and time-study. And Hadley does manage to give us some good advice throughout: "the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than all the invisible turmoil of the inner life, which we set such store by. The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you."

[(Lonestarlibrarian) Keddy Ann Outlaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

A middling read for me: there was something cold and plodding about this novel, however beautifully written. Stella, who has plenty of smarts, for the most part (perhaps like many of us), bumbles through her life after becoming pregnant at the age of 16. Her lover is a young man Stella thinks is her soulmate, yet we learn he is gay. She and her son eventually move into a commune, and thus we get a portrait of the London counterculture. Then she has another son with a gentle man who is brutally killed.

Eventually Stella becomes and occupational therapist, despite all signs that she could have had a brilliant academic career in the field of literature (she loves to read and write). After many mistakes in her choice of men, she marries an older man named Max (whose marriage fell apart due to their dalliances). Though he really doesn't seem right for her, their marriage is greatly stabilized when they adopt a baby girl. Ultimately, this novel fell flat for me. Although Stella has hard-won streaks of independence, she somehow never gets things right. Probably that is the way things work for most of us? Perhaps I need things idealized a bit more? Who knows? The "clever girl" is someone I wanted to shake at times, maddeningly taking her wrong turns, so discontent. Aha! --- perhaps that is why I felt discontented with the novel...

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Tessa Hadley's writing. It is so precise, yet flowing and elegant.

This phrase really spoke to me and aptly describes the story of Stella, the main character:

"The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you."

Stella was raised by a single mom in the 60's. She considered herself extremely ordinary until an idea suddenly clicked into place, at which time she realized how clever she really could be...and was. She made some very poor decisions in love (and otherwise), but she ultimately persevered and matured in the process.

This is is a fairly quiet contemplative book, but it is by no means boring. I really enjoyed it.

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't think I could love Tessa Hadley's writing more, but I do. As with Anne Tyler it's advisable not to read too many of her books in quick succession as she writes about the same kind of thing every time, but I find her more vivid and affecting than Tyler. Partly it's because, as in this book, her protagonists are usually close in age to me, growing up in the UK in the 60s and 70s, and her settings feel so real. It's also because she has such a brilliant eye for detail. In a sentence she can conjure up a vivid, authentic image of a place or a person. She doesn't really stick to the "show, don't tell" mantra, but her descriptions of her characters' states of mind take you right inside their heads. Often I recognise aspects of myself. Then again, I'm not a mother but Stella's experience of being one (far too young) felt completely real and believable, giving an insight I might not have had otherwise.

Hadley doesn't really do plots -- this is a life lived, narrated in an intimate way as if it was a friend talking to you. Note to some reviewers who take the title at face value -- Stella is clever, but not always wise. She makes stupid choices and mistakes, but life goes on, she picks herself up and somehow copes. I must say I did not expect her to end up where she did! But Hadley's skill is such that you accept it. And after all we probably all know people whose misspent youth resolved itself in unexpected ways through meeting the right person or finding the right job. The ending is left nicely open, leaving Stella contented while still seeking her way in life.

I think this has nudged The Past off the top spot in my Hadley rankings. Loved it. This more articulate review is worth a read.

[Valerie Miner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published in THE WOMEN'S REVIEW OF BOOKS, July/August, 2014

Clever Girl
by Tessa Hadley
New York: HarperCollins, 2014, 252 pp., $25.99, hardcover

Reviewed by Valerie Miner

Tessa Hadley’s seventh book of fiction follows clever Stella from her early childhood in a claustrophobic Bristol bedsit to an affluent life with three children, a loving partner, and a house in the country. Clever Girl explores a range of contemporary western female tropes: abandonment by father and lovers, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, fraught mother-daughter relationship, experiment in nonsexist communal living, romance with a married man, adoption of a child from a developing country, self-acceptance in middle age.

Born in 1956, Stella is being raised by her single mother Edna in Bristol’s dowdy Kingsdown section. One day Edna marries Gerry, a well-meaning man who is insensitive to how he’s disrupting Stella’s life. Gerry takes his new family to the leafy suburb of Stoke Bishop, where Edna finds renewal but petulant Stella wallows in loneliness. The girl revives through the fast, and lasting, friendship with a quirky neighbor girl, Madeline.

Cleverness is highly valued by Stella’s mother and stepfather. Confident and intellectually bright, Stella wins a prized scholarship to secondary school. But her instincts are surprisingly dull—whether she’s showing up Gerry by bettering him at a physics problem or risking her future with unprotected sex. She seems to struggle with and against her native intelligence. If, as Emerson tells us, common sense is the genius of the working class, Stella misses out big time.

Stella’s boyfriend Valentine—part Johnny Depp, part Oscar Wilde—introduces her to Beckett, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, good weed, and first sex. And who wouldn’t fall in love with him? “…his cigarette cocked up cheekily between lips curved as improbably, generously wide as a faun’s. The pointed chin was like a faun’s too, and the flaunting Caravaggio cheekbones pushing up the thick flesh under his eyes, making them slanted and mischievous. He was tall, but not too tall; his school trousers slid down his impossibly narrow waist and hips." His androgynous beauty also attracts his English teacher, Fred Harper, who at first is threatened by Stella and later becomes her close friend.

As is the way with stunning wraiths, Valentine disappears. After he leaves for the States, the all-too-corporeal Stella discovers she is pregnant and gets kicked out of Edna and Gerry’s house. In one of the novel’s many coincidences, Stella wanders into a park where she meets a stranger, Mrs. Tapper, who invites her to be her live-in housekeeper and nanny. Life at the Tappers’ commodious home serves Stella well, until one day when she randomly opens a book of poetry and reads a single line by Walt Whitman that somehow reveals she is wasting her life. So she moves in with Valentine’s ex-teacher, the sexually ambiguous Fred Harper, with whom she just happens to have become reacquainted at one of Mrs. Tapper’s dinner parties.

While Hadley excels at descriptions of people, she also skillfully places us directly in domestic spaces: "There were times when I didn’t mind anything: the hazy yellow evening light, the midges swarming, the back door open to the yard where the boys’ bikes and plastic racquets lay where they had dropped them, the thrush singing in a hornbeam in the garden."

And she draws us intimately into Stella’s visceral responses. Here a houseguest comes on to the twentyish Stella: "I was suddenly aware of him blocking my way when I tried to pass him on the landing: he stopped me clumsily.…Then—buried in the completed blackness against his sour heavy clothes, nose and throat full of new intimacy and the unknown of his body—I was more mystified and gratified than anything. Or, I felt as if I was falling through the lit surface of things, out into a new realm of experience where everything was upside down, and darker."

The novel’s coincidences, inconsistencies, and narrative gaps detract from Hadley’s insights and often-eloquent language. The episodic story shifts creakily back and forth in time. We learn one person is dead before we meet him. Stella goes to extraordinary lengths to find her birth-father, but when she is handed his email address, she simply abandons the project. Too often Hadley, who can be adept at the dramatic moment, forsakes scenic story development for long paragraphs of explanation. For someone so nimble at conveying the intricacies of Stella’s love for her children, Hadley resorts to surprising caricature about adults and their pursuits—witness the snide, stereotypical description of the commune where Stella lives for a tumultuous time.

All’s well that ends well, according to one of the authors Stella studies when she quite abruptly decides to pursue a degree in literature. “I did very well at university. I got first-class marks for my essays and in exams almost from the beginning. My imagination grew bolder every day.” She’s heading toward a PhD, then suddenly swerves into occupational therapy. And of course she meets another man, who may—or may not—make her live happily ever after.

While Stella seems fixated on the men in her life—her absent dad; her irritating stepfather; the fathers of her two sons; Fred Harper; and finally, the tender but inaccessible, married Mac—it’s the women who help her survive. She would be lost without the support of her plucky mother, her loyal aunt, the faithful Madeline, and her adopted Brazilian daughter Ester, who arrives just in time to enrich Stella’s middle age.

We leave Stella embarking on her sixth decade at the beginning of a new century. Finally she has wed her intellectual cleverness to a seasoned intuition. Like most of us, she’s led a semi-accidental life. Happily, she no longer flirts with catastrophe. She’s learned enough from the past to savor lucky moments and small blessings. At fifty, Stella is someone I’d like to meet. Perhaps Hadley will follow up and let us know what happens to the clever girl and her unlikely tribe.

Valerie Miner’s new novel is Traveling with Spirits (2013). Her thirteen other books include novels, story collections, and a memoir. She teaches at Stanford University.

[Lyd Moo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really sure what to think of this one. It was all about character development - not much plot, you could find it boring. It felt a bit poetry like and I liked the raw nature of the depiction of the character but just didn’t give me anything super special although it was interesting to me as it was based in Bristol

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those rather subtle, very British novels whose substance and depth sneak up on you. The story never hurries, never seems to have much of a destination, so to speak, other than the telling of one woman's life and times -- a thinking woman, a restless woman, constantly introspecting and yet moving forward, getting on, as the Brits would say. And yet there is an undercurrent, unmistakable, of something profound in the tale, something philosophical and wise and practical in her unlikely evolutions. She's certainly not always a likable or admirable protagonist, but there is a staunch authenticity about her. And the language, the writing, is excellent.

[Melanie Greene · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.startribune.com/entertainm...

My review was in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, so check it there, but basically: intricately observed portrait of a 'clever girl' whose mind fails to take her where she thought it would, and who has to navigate the reality which is so different from her dreams. Really lovely.

[Milly Potter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy stories of mundane life and this one was very good. It has some lovely writing in it, and although I'm very different to the protagonist, I really did care about her.
This was written by a Uni lecturer I had, which was why I picked it up; a good find!

[Suzanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautiful, lyrical writing, but I just couldn't warm up to any of the characters. And as another reader stated below, I was bored with the story.

[Helen Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of Stella's life is a roller-coaster... She's clever but foolish... A difficult life is punctuated by tragedy, misfortune, poor decisions. Told in the first person, we're privvy to Stella's logic and rash decisions which are, at times, hard to read. TH 's brilliance as a keen observer with great insight adds to the enjoyment of this book. And although It took me longer than usual to finish Clever Girl... Not quite a page turner but the ending is rewarding.

[Éamon · Rating 3 out of 5]

eh okay. the start was so boring that i kept leaving it off and not reading it. got interesting like over half way through but even then.. just eh. nice writing style tho

[Adriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever Girl follows our main character, Stella, through all her struggles, decisions, and mistakes. You see the course of her life as if she was retelling it at an old age. There is a great deal of pain in her life caused by others and her own flaws. You get to know her in a very intimate, personal way. She's an ordinary woman that goes through life making the same mistakes that everyone else does. By having this story about someone who could be anyone there was a sense of connection I felt towards Stella. With all her faults and mistakes I couldn't help think about my own life and how I'll decide to live it. Even if someone knows what they want they can get sidetracked like Stella ultimately does at a very young age. Young love, early pregnancies to two fathers that aren't or can't be around, Stella faces it alone with the help of some strangers and some friends from time to time. She kind of becomes her mother which if pretty funny because I think that's what daughters (and even me) fear is going to happen to them. It's also funny when she starts mentioning her sons at points of the story even before they are born since her second born is clearly exactly like her wild, angry-at-the-world self.

Stella has an argumentative, push-and-pull personality and relationship as she develops in her teen years. You could just see where everything was going to go downhill. She was hanging around a boy who of course her mother and stepfather didn't approve of. Stella has never approved of her stepfather. Her angry side really came out when he came into the mix. I think when you're a teenager you go through this transition where you are pissed at your parents, the world, and everyone in it. You see only what you want. We don't really grow out of our selfishness that kids inherently have in them. I saw myself in the way she acted when she was younger. I wasn't nearly as rebellious, my rebelliousness was pretty much nonexistent - it was there in spirit, but I could still see the selfishness of not wanting to grow up that I'm sure many people grapple with.

You see her mature out of this stage of standoffishness towards others but you also see the mistakes she continues to make. I wanted to tell her to stop! You have something good. Stop messing it up. There's this air of sadness that comes with her life yet she does try her hardest to make her life better for her and her sons. She struggles so much! This story could be really tragic at times. There are those moments where she gets away from that sadness and I love those moments. I wanted to see her succeed. This book produced so much overwhelming emotions in me. It's a really great story about growing up and overcoming all the things thrown at you in life including your own misguided ways.