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.
Yotam Ottolenghi is pretty inescapable in the UK. It’s not an obscure reference for Brits (indeed, it’s rather painfully pointed: just the kind of thing for a book club of that exact kind.)
I see Ottolenghi’s books around at any bookstore here in the U.S., but he is not as pervasive as I think he is in the U.K. (Which is more pervasive in the U.K., him or Lawson?)
Ottolenghi, I think (but I am not the best person to ask.)
Yotam Ottolenghi is closely associated in my mind with Garth Marenghi, but I believe that they are in fact two quite distinct people.
Ottolenghi and Lawson play to very different crowds. Ottolenghi represents a more modern kind of international sophistication in lefty middle-class circles who might think of Nigella as just a little old-fashioned and provincial, not to say déclassé.
I have heard the name Ottolenghi, but my first two guesses would have been ‘American politician’ and ‘footballer’ – I’m not sure I’ve have got to ‘chef’.
I am old-fashioned and provincial, however.
@Peter
You mean the cooking is seen as provincial or déclassé, rather than Nigella herself, It is a little odd for me, when you have someone like Gordon Ramsay, who might have had a rather different introduction to food and cooking in the home than Nigella. Would you say Rick Stein is also perceived as provincial by the foodies you are talking about?
@Jen et alia,
I have heard the name Ottolenghi, but my first two guesses would have been
‘American politician’ and ‘footballer’Welsh ‘viola virtuoso’ and ‘karate champion’ – I’m not sure I’ve have got to ‘chef’.I am old-fashioned and provincial, however.
Me too!
I am not sure how one can walk around London these days and not hear the name “Ottolenghi”. Certainly if you walk into a Waterstones you usually can’t avoid one of his books on display.
To be sure, it is a shame the man has not opened a restaurant called Ottolenghi’s Darkplace.
Ottolenghi (whom I probably first encountered in the Guardian, but who also pops up a lot in the NYT) is known for Mediterranean fusion recipes with, in my opinion, interesting flavor combinations. But also ingredient lists a mile long and instructions that are often directly out of the Ufficio Complicazione Affari Semplici, as they say around here. So the competition among the book club people must be a little exhausting.
Re “old age,” if the two ladies were undergraduates in the “early” 1970’s w/o more exact specification, what does that mean? In the abstract (and adjusting for 3 rather than 4 years as an undergraduate) I would say probably born no earlier than 1950 and no later than 1952, but with some chance of being outside that range? Although the now-deceased “Mattie” was “just a baby” in 1951 and was already a grad student when they were still undergrads, which might complicate that. But the ladies still I should think need to be materially older than the writer, born in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree from 1978 which takes her undergraduate years rather notably out of the “early” Seventies.
Separately can anyone (ideally British) comment on the image of the “lump of resin and rolling tobacco on an LP cover”? I assume the “resin” is most likely hashish (opium would have been outre for the setting and time period?), but mixing up your hashish with loose tobacco to then roll into cigarettes/joints was not a standard mode of consumption I recall from my own undergraduate days although it may have been different in other times/places. And perhaps the British supply chain was such that hashish (more compact and thus easier to smuggle?) was proportionately more common over there in ratio to “regular” marijuana?
@JWB: mixing crumbled hashish with either rolling tobacco or the tobacco from a disassembled cigarette is the ont way of using it I’ve witnessed. I know in principle that it can be smoked in pure form in a pipe, or cooked with fruit juice to make madjoun, but I’ve never seen anyone do either
Re “old age,” if the two ladies were undergraduates in the “early” 1970’s w/o more exact specification, what does that mean? In the abstract (and adjusting for 3 rather than 4 years as an undergraduate) I would say probably born no earlier than 1950 and no later than 1952, but with some chance of being outside that range? Although the now-deceased “Mattie” was “just a baby” in 1951 and was already a grad student when they were still undergrads, which might complicate that.
I’m not sure where you’re getting “no later than 1952”; if you were starting college in 1974 (which I think we can all agree is still the early ’70s) you might well have been born in 1956. And Mattie could easily have been born c. 1950 and been a grad student at that time.
I certainly do not agree that 1974 was the “early” Seventies rather than the “mid” Seventies (four out of ten qualifying years were already over and done with by 1/1/74), plus the context of the statement is that the ladies’ undergraduate years in general had been in the “early” Seventies rather than e.g. a 1973 matriculation but a 1976 (on the abbreviated English system) graduation. I would certainly accept a 1974 graduation because the center-of-gravity of the overall undergraduate experience would still have been “early,” while a 1975 graduation seems like a more challenging edge case.
But maybe “early” means something different in BrEng and I am open to correction on that score. And the chronology is admittedly vague in general – there’s e.g. no random reference to a dateable historical event that occurred while they were sharing that tent w/ Mattie. And it does say that the ladies are “now” in their seventies, which for a 2025-published story is not literally consistent with a 1956 birth.
Re: “early” 70s: I basically agree with what Hat said, and I don’t think this is a BrEng/AmEng difference, but maybe one of idiolect. I wouldn’t have any problem with “They were undergraduates then, in the early seventies” applying to someone who matriculated in, say, 1973 (or 1968).
To me, 1974 is kind of an edge case to be the “early 70s”, but my idiolect doesn’t require the time period in “They were undergraduates then, in the early seventies” to exclusively be in the early 70s – it just needs to contain at least a couple years of the early 70s to count. And in that context, I’d accept 1974 – so a university career of, say 1973-1977, with only 73-74 in the early 70s, would be enough for me.
ETA: I speak American English
Smoking without tobacco seems to be a rather American thing. Indeed, lots of people believe it’s called a joint because you join tobacco and hemp to make one.
Haven’t those European hopheads been warned by their governments about how tobacco could be dangerous to their health?
Quick googling reveals a description of one method of hashish-consumption I recall from the Eighties (called in this source the “pin and glass” approach, although I don’t recall that specific label), with the hilarious intro “Historical consumption methods still work when modern equipment isn’t available. These techniques demonstrate hash’s versatility and cultural heritage.”
It’s not the tobacco that’s dangerous. It’s the smoke.
Nicotine is addictive and makes your blood vessels contract. That’s pretty much all it does.
If you like a sentence to have more than one or two words and to contain a verb, then you won’t much like Quel histoire ! Ségolène Royal et François Hollande, by Françoise Degois (Plon). The following passage is typical of many throughout the book:
There are seven “sentences”, in 29 words, with just one verb! At the time I posted a review at Amazon (not there anymore: I deleted all my Amazon reviews in about 2018; I don’t remember why) there were 11 reviews at amazon.fr of which most were far more favourable than mine — “I greatly liked the writing in this book”, etc. — so apparently there are plenty of people who do like that sort of thing.
@A. C-B
I think this particular style is best when used to depict mental reflection/turmoil during moments of physical (or vocal) inaction (or indeed, in telegrams as below).
—
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J’ai reçu un télégramme de l’asile: «Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués.» Cela ne veut rien dire. C’était peut-être hier.
—
After these sentences, our hero has formed a short-term plan and describes it in sentences with more than one clause, no clause missing a subject or verb.
The tobacco itself is dangerous as well. Tobacco contains tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs) which are carcinogens. There is definitely a cancer risk associated with chewing tobacco or inhaling it as snuff. I don’t know if tobacco is any worse than alcohol or processed meat though.
It’s difficult to compare the harms of tobacco-smoking with those of alcohol, because the indirect and social harms of alcohol abuse are much greater than those of smoking.* On a purely physical individual basis, smoking is definitely more harmful on average (individuals obviously may vary.) A salient difference is that typical moderate alcohol drinkers are probably not much harmed by the habit physically, whereas a typical moderate smoker suffers definite damage.
Laypeople tend to focus on the cancer risks of smoking (not unnaturally), but the hit to life expectancy is actually more connected with bronchitis and suchlike repiratory disease and with heart and circulatory damage. Also, it makes you more likely to go blind.
* I once spent an entire weekend night shift in casualty, where every single person I saw was drunk. Eventually, to my relief, I came to an octogenarian lady who had broken her hip falling out of bed; however, it turned out that this was probably connected with the fact that she had been drinking sherry all evening.
Smokeless tobacco can be a but less harmful than smoking, since it supplies the nicotine without the accompaniment of a of a bunch of greasy smoke (“tar”) that is also carcinogenic.
Purely as a matter of my own subjectivity, the early 1970s (and indeed “The Sixties”) ended in mid-to-late 1973, with the unraveling of Watergate and the OPEC oil shock. The former forced many of our elders to agree with us about Nixon, thereby destroying a binary vital to Sixties divisions. The latter pulled the last rug out from under “postwar prosperity.” Oh, and dope was suddenly getting much stronger (“Have you tried this, uh, ‘Colombian Gold’?”), changing the experience of smoking it from a friendly hour passing joints around a circle, to quickly getting zonked and retreating into one’s world. (This was for me a bit later, viz. summer of ’74.)
I had indeed missed the discovery of TSNAs; they form “during the curing and processing of tobacco”. Nitrosamines have long been known to be quite horrible.
Alcohol comes out looking worse every time there’s a new study.