Hadley’s admirers will not be disappointed. These pages are punctuated by her familiar calm, clear-eyed psychological acumen; by her delicate and precise lyrical descriptions (particularly of nature: 'the bluebells were like pools of water among the trees, reflecting the sky'); and by the formal freedom with which she roams through psyches and time ... Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley has the gift of making small canvases inexhaustibly new. She sees unsentimentally the subtle gestures that alter people’s lives forever; and charts, too, the instances when those gestures change nothing at all ... This zoom lens effect gives Hadley’s work the tenderness of wisdom: she grants readers an almost Buddhist apprehension of time’s inexorable levelling force. She captures childhood’s consuming immediacy; and with equal vividness, the confusions of young womanhood ... Compassionate and luminous, Hadley sees them all — or should I say, she sees us all: our travails, our fantasies and our small joys.
Her meticulously observed, extraordinarily perceptive stories are as satisfying as Alice Munro's. Yes, Hadley is that good ... the ten tales in Hadley's book – seven of which were first published in The New Yorker — are instantly immersive ... Unlike many short story writers, who serve up slices of life cut so thin you're left craving more, Hadley offers both rich complexity and satisfying closure — so you never feel as if you've been precipitously evicted.
The title story of Tessa Hadley’s outstanding new collection sits at the heart of the book. It is exquisite, haunting and serves as something of an index to the whole ... Hadley captures, beautifully, the feeling of events unfolding – often unanticipated, unpredictable – and is alert to the stream of recalibrations and negotiations at play as her characters try to process new experience ... Bad Dreams is remarkable not only for Hadley’s penetrating engagement with her subject matter, but for her extraordinary and distinctive range. It combines acerbic social observation and wry humour with moments of breathtaking delicacy and tenderness. This is a collection to be read and reread.
Hadley’s spell — and she is a spellbinding writer — derives its power from the way she keeps the uncanny almost precisely counterbalanced with the commonplace. No, that’s wrong: It’s the way she discloses the uncanny within all that is commonplace ... These pages are rife with finely jarring details and apparently minor trespasses that turn out to reverberate ... Turning things inside out, tipping them upside down, placing mismatched objects side by side, nesting harm within harmlessness and vice versa: All this Hadley does to great and various effect, yielding humor here and sorrow there, serving up the bitter along with the delicious.
Ms. Hadley seeks out the secrets embedded in the ordinary, and though this collection is more variable than her best work—the 2013 novel-in-stories Clever Girl—it’s filled with odd and glittering nuggets.
Tessa Hadley’s marvelous new collection, Bad Dreams and Other Stories scrutinizes difficult, messy relationships. But her 10 emotionally perceptive tales — which reveal our jealousies, desires and humiliations — are told through the lives of some fascinating women. And what muddled lives! ... Hadley demonstrates how brief, powerful relationships can forever change people. Many of these stories are set in mid-20th century England, and along the way we get a tour of English cities: Leeds, Liverpool, London. Deliciously, Hadley’s characters also practice the art of deceit, unaware how stacked lies will eventually topple over onto them. In her story worlds, keeping a secret from others means deceiving oneself in the process.
...a quiet but nevertheless vicious catalog of the misery dealt to women who care — for themselves, for other people, or for abstract principles like love or justice … The impossibility of forgetting something bad once you have known it runs like a current through these peculiar stories. Each one has a perplexing, but compelling, blend of familiarity and idiosyncrasy. The settings, the plots, even the characters giving off a low, comfortable hum of literary Englishness … The quotations or references are not used, as they so often are, to confer a sense of literary high seriousness, or even to punctuate that sort of high seriousness. Instead, Hadley’s references draw attention to both the way her characters are products of literary and historical pressures and also to the way literature may not be as powerful as its adherents often assume it to be.
Perhaps the only weak point in the collection are the stories’ final pages — sometimes abrupt, sometimes trying too hard for ambiguity. Though I suppose, in keeping with the collection on a thematic level, this could be a reflection of the banality and mystery of modern life. As a collection, the everyday lives of these girls and women become exceptional when told through Hadley’s intricate and perceptive prose. The pace is often leisurely — sometimes a little too leisurely — but it’s obvious Tessa Hadley has the restraint and mastery of a great writer, and there is beauty and insight in all 10 tales.
10 quietly explosive short stories that reveal, with unsparing precision, the epic drama simmering beneath the mundanity of everyday life ... Hadley captures her characters at turning points so subtle they themselves rarely notice them. Ordinary as they are, these are episodes that will echo, softly, throughout her characters' lives. Achingly lovely, though never sentimental, Hadley’s collection renders common lives with exquisite grace.
...[a] remarkably precise and perceptive collection of short stories ... In subtly insightful and observant prose, Hadley writes brilliantly of the words and gestures that pass unnoticed 'in the intensity of [the] present' but echo without cease.
