Accidents in the Home: A Novel [Hardcover]

Tessa Hadley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 13, 2002

A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family

Clare Verey, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three, bakes her own bread and grinds her own spices. She has a comfortable home in the suburbs and a devoted husband. Why is it, then, that when her best friend's lover appears in her life he has the power to invert her world? Why is the desire for more never satisfied?

So begins Accidents in the Home, a novel that exposes the emotional underbelly of a modern-day family. Clare's narrative is deftly intertwined with the stories of her extended family: her mother, Marian, the clever daughter of a Dostoevsky scholar whose husband leaves her for a beautiful young art student; Clare's half brother, Toby, a dreamy boy who prefers to view life through the lens of a camera; her troubled younger half sister, Tamsin, who develops an apparatus of taboos and rituals to restore order to her chaotic past.

In the world Tessa Hadley has created, family is no longer a steady foundation but a complex web of marriages, divorces, half siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal. Accidents in the Home offers a startling, intimate portrait of family life in our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hadley weaves characters' lives and sensibilities into an affecting tapestry of love, loss, pain and introspection in her debut novel, a den of consequence for actions and events that are not really accidents at all. Clare Verey is a martyr, a near-adultress and part of a family train wreck that began with her father's first marriage and is still on its way to an explosive end. Clare's quiet life in the English countryside with husband Bram and their three children turns upside down when her glamorous best friend, Helly, arrives with a new boyfriend, David, and Clare begins to feel suffocated by her own ordinariness. Clare's preoccupation with David grows simultaneously with her contempt for men and motherhood, and a dark, frantic mood. A complex family tree reveals Clare's marital troubles to be symptomatic of her father's views on love, sex and marriage. Stepmothers and stepsiblings provide multiple foils for Clare's obsession with the ideals of family life and relationships. Her younger sister, Tamsin, brushes thoughts of her stillborn baby and dead boyfriend under a carpet of theater tickets and expensive clothes; half-brother Toby is disturbed by his mother's relationship with an abusive woman and by the chaos in Clare's domestic life; Graham, Clare's father, and Linda, his latest wife, square off against each another in a battle of wills. Though Hadley and her characters are preoccupied with irony, something that doesn't fully manifest itself in the novel, their stories are compelling and rich in the minutiae of family life.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This densely populated debut by British author Hadley is yet another novel of dysfunctional husbands and wives who seek greener pastures with best friends' wives and husbands. Clare leads a comfortable, Martha Stewart existence with her university sweetheart husband and a passel of well-adjusted children until she meets David, the lover of her best friend, Helly. Nothing really happens when she follows David back to London, using her need to do library research as a ruse, except that she leaves husband Bram to entertain Helly. Meanwhile, Clare's father gets a night out alone and decides to dump his hippy wife, Naomi, for the lanky young Linda. Readers may need scorecards at this point. Step-siblings abound, and sorting out relationships gets a bit difficult by book's end. Hadley is a skilled and thoughtful writer, and her characters have much to say about the complexity and durability of marriage, but it's often lost under the weight of guilt and anxiety. Recommended for large quality fiction collections. [The opening chapter was recently excerpted in The New Yorker. Ed.] Susan Clifford Braun, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, C.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (May 13, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805070648
• ISBN-13: 978-0805070644
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,363,247 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Protags on Prozac, December 12, 2002

By 

JoAnne Goldberg (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Accidents in the Home: A Novel (Hardcover)

Accidents is an ambitious undertaking that's overloaded with characters and subplots, yet lacks the energy required for takeoff. Result: a quick read that gives us glimpses into the lives of way too many characters, most of whom seem so depressingly similar to one another that it's hard to care about any of them. Bland is the order of the day.

Clare is the chief protagonist, and the heart of the novel is her leaving her "partner" Bram (is he her husband? not quite sure, and what's the point of the ambiguity?) initially to spend time with her friend Helly's boyfriend and then for...well, nothing really. Another man, Tony, but we the readers know that relationship won't last very long.

Bram doesn't seem like a bad sort, and Clare and Bram do have three one-dimensional children (though it's hard to imagine a boy allowing anyone to call him Coco, the nickname of Clare's son, and it's a little silly to have daughters named Rose and Lily, but those are nitpicks). Bram easily replaces inoffensive Clare with the plastic but rich and worldly Helly as soon as he suspects something's amiss.

Ah, but isn't that the point of the book? Relationships are fungible; when you grow weary of one spouse, you find another--a pattern exemplified by Clare's father. What's particularly striking is the lack of passion that accompanies these transitions. The characters seem to spend their days in perpetual torpor, just as the author flits from character to character, seemingly tiring of one and moving on to the next. Even when Clare sees her kids together with Bram and Helly--one happy little family--she seems to feel nothing more intense than mild distress.

Three stars for the snappy writing and entertaining snippets of realistic dialogue, and for the fact that you can plow through this one in a sitting without any muss to your manicure.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting and Well-Written Novel, June 20, 2002

By 

Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Accidents in the Home: A Novel (Hardcover)

Accidents in the Home is an interesting and well-written novel--an examination of human relationships and the various "accidents" made in these relationships. Clare Verey a 29 year old married woman is the focal point of the novel, with chapters alternating between her story and those of the various members of her extended family--half brother, stepmother, father, etc. Each character has his or her faults and foibles exposed to us. May of the characters seem to naturally gravitate to the wrong type of person, the wrong type of relationship. When I read back the words I have just written, I realize that I have painted a rather bleak picture of a definitely unbleak novel. Accidents in the Home is quite an enjoyable read, well-told and engaging. The characters are likeable, their flaws, forgivable. Enjoy.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too many people behaving randomly, April 7, 2003

By 

Karen Zukor (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Accidents in the Home: A Novel (Hardcover)

Synopsis: Too many characters, though very few are particularly interesting, admirable or deep, behaving randomly.

Clare, the protagonist, breaks up her family for an affair, though it is never clear that she is really dissatisfied or with what exactly. The object of the affair then promptly evaporates as a character. Her husband turns to her former best friend, even though it's made clear that they don't really like each other or have anything in common. After this, they also reappear only briefly and superficially. Hadley drops hints of some real issues (Clare's mother-in-law's insomnia, Tamsin's cutting herself, Naomi's drinking) but then fails to follow up, leaving the reader to wonder at their being mentioned at all.

Better books on motherhood's frustrations include Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work and Karen Karbo's Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me