I’ve praised Tessa Hadley many times at LH (e.g., last year), and I’m going to do so again; her latest New Yorker story, “The Quiet House” (archived), is every bit as good as I expected, and I thought I’d bring a couple of excerpted paragraphs here in the hope of enticing readers:
During the time of their youthful adventures, and although they proclaimed themselves feminists, they still more or less thought all those things about the inauthenticity of women. They didn’t so much think them with their conscious minds: the sensation of secondariness was built into the very texture of their imagination and their desires. They supplied to every adventure some invisible observer, male, to fulfill it and make it real. And yet the girls also took for granted, with contemptuous confidence, their right to travel alone and wear shorts and sleeveless tops if they wanted to, while girls their age in Italy and Greece were kept chastely at home. They learned how to say foul things in other languages, in order to put off the boys and men in those countries who followed them and propositioned them, pleading with them so insistently and cravenly—“like dogs,” Jane said. They saw the recoil and disgust on the boys’ faces, at hearing those words from a girl’s mouth.
[…]The book group had degenerated somewhat, Jane and Geraldine both thought, into a kind of dining club, each member feeling obligated to put on a spread of delicious Ottolenghi-type dishes when it was their turn to host. Discussion of the books was too perfunctory; the two friends’ ideal would have been more like a seminar. They brought their books marked up and bristling with torn slips of paper, and were disappointed when they were hardly opened. Both of them devoured fiction: Jane, a history graduate, was susceptible to a serious theme and anything in translation, whereas Geraldine, who’d done English literature, insisted she cared only about the sentences. Life was hard, she said. Thank God for sentences.
And speaking of sentences, here’s the story’s first: “Geraldine woke out of busy dreams into the calms and shallows of old age.” I memorized it even as I read it. Now, that’s writing.
Reminiscence of “The Metamorphosis” in that first line.
I was trying to figure out “Ottolenghi-type dishes” because it seemed to ring a bell, but google is clarifying that that’s a 21st century London thing. I finally figured out that it sounded similar to “Ottomanelli,” which has intermittently over the last century or so been a name to conjure with when eating in NYC. Alas the Ottomanelli’s location on upper Lexington Ave. very close to my last residence in Manhattan (which I left more than two decades ago now) is apparently now permanently closed.
@jwb
Maybe try the “women’s pages”?
https://cooking.nytimes.com/author/yotam-ottolenghi
Meh. Sentence fragments are way cooler. All the popular kids use them nowadays.
Say what now?
No doubt Jane felt that shedding some of the things you’d been and done and believed was one of the conveniences of growing older.
You betcha.