Customer Reviews

The Master Bedroom: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Hadley has a knack for the unreliable narrator. The truth of a character's life stays hidden even from the character, and yet the paradox is that it makes the character very naked. Although the title is steamy and probably will tease readers of mainstream cant--(writers like Jodi Pocault who write with cliches and cardboard characters), this is a richly textured novel not meant for folks who don't appreciate literature. If you like archetypes and soap-opera level writing, this isn't for you. If you like Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, you might enjoy this book.

After more than two decades in London's academic circle, Russian Literature professor Kate Flynn returns to her hometown of Cardiff, Wales to care for her aging mother, Billie. However, without her career or her literary friends, Kate feels somewhat out of place at home. When she meets childhood friend Dr. David Roberts at a concert, Kate is interested as she was attracted to him as a teen and apparently still is.

However, David is married to Suzie, whose recent behavior of vanishing for days and ignoring their children and him when she is home worries the family. He finds temporary sanctuary with Kate. David's seventeen-year-old son Jamie also finds comfort with Kate; as her artsy eccentricity makes her seem so much younger than his parents. As the two Roberts court Kate in their differing peculiar ways, she tries to keep the triangle from imploding.

This is an interesting romantic triangle starring three fully developed protagonists. Kate is the prime focus of the story line of a woman in a middle age crisis dealing with an older mom and no vocation to keep her mind from wandering. Adding to her being the star is obviously the two males who desire her while she wants the older one without harming the younger one. Fans of deep character studies will appreciate Tessa Hadley discerning look at a woman at the crossroads of her life.

Harriet Klausner

The Master Bedroom is an intimate drama centered on a middle-aged woman who becomes romantically entangled with a married man and his son during the year she returns to her childhood home to care for her elderly mother. Hadley excels at describing the small details of human interactions (the handshake that lingers longer than necessary, the purposeful brush of contact, the subtle change of voice). There aren't any soap operatic scenes in The Master Bedroom, but Hadley nevertheless creates a quiet kind of dramatic tension that quickly propels the plot. In addition to Hadley's narrative finesse, her well-crafted prose makes The Master Bedroom a joy to read. Highly recommended.

I don't know whether I liked this book or not, but I CAN say that it took me longer to finish it than it takes me to read three or four books of the same length. Its soporific nature, its sloooooooooow story, its strangely annoying main character all combined to make me fall asleep (literally) after only a page or two.

OK, we have Kate, maybe a latter-day intellectual hippie, who grew up in a half intellectual strangely confusing house of Jewish parents whose families (at least one) escaped the Holocaust. I think. It really has no bearing whatsoever on the plot, but is mentioned more than once. Said intellectual hippie/beauty/violinist/professor/reviewer (all of the above? none of the above?) Kate comes to nurse her failing mother in her last days. But she is mean to her mother, always has been, but she adores her and nurses her well. I get tired just writing this down.

Kate is having a midlife crisis and destroys several men in her wake, inexcuseable, self-indulgent, and mean all the while.

End of topic. This is NOT chick lit, as somebody labeled it. It's more just a jumble of finely written but incomphrehensible mishmash--I think meant to be very meaningful, but I just didn't get it. Oh. And it takes place in Wales, which is neither here nor there.

This gloomy novel set in rainy, cold Wales is a scarcely satisfactory attempt to shed light on the major change that Russian literature professor Kate Flynn is making in her life by abandoning a successful London university career and returning to her large, crumbling childhood estate in Cardiff, Wales to, in theory, care for her 80-something mother Billie, suffering from dementia.

Despite a certain awkwardness in style - for example, using dashes in lieu of quotations - requiring constant rereading, the author turns a keen eye towards the surroundings, the culture, and people, in general. But, her characters are puzzling, not altogether understandable.

The discontents of the unmarried diminutive, attractive Kate are never made clear, but she has always had a healthy interest in the opposite sex. She begins a uncertain relationship with David Roberts, a childhood friend and public health physician, who is having marital woes - his wife Suzie is spending a great deal of time with a counter-culture group. Most improbable is her involvement with Jamie, David's 17-year-old son, after a chance meeting in a café, especially given his reclusiveness and lethargy. It is a relationship that is secretive, tentative, and sexual.

Despite the proximity of these individuals there are few interactions and consequently there are no conflict-fueled developments and only minimal clarifications ensue. It is strange that the teenage Jamie takes far more initiative than the other two, who are strangely hesitant, indecisive, at every turn. The gloom of the Wales setting: the rain, the darkness, the mud, furnaces not working, etc, seems to have a dulling impact on the entire book. The initial possibilities for this book are not well realized. The characters finally wander off the stage, leaving minimal imprints.

The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley is the first book I've received through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program. Oddly, I received the book on June 11, about six weeks after the book was available in paperback, and the copy I received was an actual trade paperback, not an ARC. At any rate, I selected several books and received this one, possibly the one book I was unsure I even wanted to read. The synopsis was intriguing, but in a Jerry Springer/train wreck sort of way: Bored Kate Flynn leaves her London academic job and returns to her childhood home to care for her mother. While she is there, a married childhood friend and his seventeen-year-old son "set about their parallel courtships" and "Kate cannot quite resist either man." This all sounds rather seamy, in (I am happy to say) a completely inaccurate way, and I was delighted at the whim that led me to request this book. Tessa Hadley is a gifted writer of lyrical, evocative prose who has crafted a novel (her third) that is touching, funny, and complex.

Kate is both sympathetic and infuriating in her midlife crisis. Hadley has drawn her as a woman who has come untethered; though she has taken a one-year leave of absence instead of quitting her job and let her flat instead of giving it up completely, there is a sense that these steps are just delaying the inevitable. Speaking to David, a public health doctor, she calls her academic life "a kind of dream, a mistake. A life lost in books. What an abyss of difference, between your usefulness and mine. How did I choose it: this play life? I should have been a nurse. We carelessly make one choice after another and our lives pile up." She is not always nice, to put it bluntly, and there were times I didn't like her. Though her purported reason for moving home to Wales is her aging mother, it's clear that her mother is a means of escape from a life she had thought she wanted. When she first comes home, she finds her mother asleep and nearly decides to drive back to London without waking her, and she can be sharp with her mother. She takes her childhood friend Carol (who should be nominated for sainthood) for granted. She throws a lavish party purely to spite the practical David and his wife, Suzie. She tells seventeen-year-old Jamie, who has fallen in love with her, that he's too young to be her friend. But despite all these flaws, or perhaps because they make her real, I hoped that she would find what she was looking for by the end. I was expecting, rather dejectedly, for the story to end without any meaning found, without the hollows of life being filled, and I was both surprised and satisfied by the ending. Kate remakes her life, but not in any trite way, nor in the way I had expected.

This is a quiet book, with many small movements rather than a single dramatic action. Hadley's prose is well-suited to the story (or rather, stories, as the subplots share a dance floor with Kate's midlife crisis, even if they don't cut in), with simple, accurate language, like this description of her reunion with David: "They were falling into a pattern of friendship that had been, before Kate came back to live in Cardiff, exactly her idea of the sort of thing that would evolve in a place like this between grown-up cultured people" and elegant description, as when she first arrives at home: "The falling rain was blotted up overhead by the tall monkey puzzle tree or pattered onto the evergreen bushes. Below, on the lake, an invisible duck blundered splashily. A cold perfume of pines and bitter garden mulch seemed to her like the smell of the past itself." I marked dozens of pages where I found beautiful, lyrical prose or turns of phrase so elegant and perfect they made me smile. Hadley is funny, too. David's wife has fallen in with new hippie friends, and this is his parenthetical description of Menna and Neil's old van when they come to take Suzie camping: "its puttering filthy exhaust more polluting, surely, than anything they could make up for with their puritanical veganism." After Jamie cuts the grass, she tells him, "I think it looked better with the grass long. That grass was beautiful, it blew in the wind, it was blond like hair, the sound it made was like the sea. Now what does it look like? Stubbled and ugly, a poor cropped head." When Jamie looks crestfallen, she laughs.

The word "hollow" and variations on it appear too many times to count, and this is no coincidence. At forty-three, Kate feels hollow, that her life is empty. She doesn't take care of herself; she smokes and drinks, but rarely eats. The return to Wales doesn't immediately help; she reflects that "She had screwed up her own professional life as if it didn't matter and stepped outside it into where she was no one." She talks of being unmoored, of longing to be broken down and remade. Even literature is hollow: "Nothing written now has enough in it. I have to swap about, as soon as I get the hang of what they're up to; they're only ever up to one thing at a time." This is certainly not the case with this novel. In addition to Kate's search for meaning, we have glimpses into David and Suzie's failing marriage, Billie's failing health, Jamie's youthful search for meaning in his life (which makes for an interesting contrast to Kate's). This is the sort of book that I would have loved writing papers on in college. The story is unbelievably rich, and I could easily make this review pages and pages long, but I'll stop here. I'd recommend this book to anyone who looking for a rich, complex novel about the human experience, written in gorgeous, decadent prose.

Kate Flynn has given up her professorship and moved back to Wales. Her pretense is her ailing mother, but her underlying reason is pure boredom. She spends her days wrapped in layers of clothing reading books off the shelves and playing her violin with a local quartet in the living room. "I hate the idea of work," she tells her friend Carol. "I'm ashamed I didn't liberate myself long ago." The house, "Firenze," is both monstrous in size and decrepit in character. Entire rooms go unused, including the master bedroom where Kate and her mother were both conceived and born. The house holds history but neither woman knows its stories. Each has struggled on as the sole descendant in her family line, separated by degrees and time from any sense of connection to the past.

Kate is someone we love to hate: privileged, critical, unaffected, selfish...and subsequently loved and revered by everyone. This proves messy when two of the reverent Kate-lovers are a married man and his teenaged son, both looking for anchorage in a woman who can barely keep her own feet on the ground. Kate floats through life ethereally. Her frail body struggles to find place and meaning in a world she seems to have figured out already, leaving her unsatisfied and shivering for want of something more. A shared love of music connects her to the man, and a dead mother by suicide connects her to the boy. But as one pursues her against her will and the other hangs back against his desire, she finds herself no closer to solidity.

THE MASTER BEDROOM is Tessa Hadley's third novel, and an excerpt from the book was recently published in The New Yorker, under the title "The Swan." Hadley is an example of "writing what you know," as she too lives in Wales and teaches literature. Kate, though, seems slightly monolithic and clichéd: a cultured professor who lives on family money, breaks up with a boyfriend for being too boring, and has the experience of an undergraduate affair with a middle-aged professor securely under her belt. It is a book that reveals a certain baseness bred in boredom, and within the pages there is a sense of meaninglessness that sometimes seems to accompany those of the Western world for which things come too easily. There is no real crescendo or denouement; therefore, the book seems to be taken better as a snapshot of stagnating characters than as a story of love and loss.

While THE MASTER BEDROOM does appear dark and depressing, Hadley's prose flows easily and without so much as a single glitch within the pages. Occasionally she takes a bit too long to add in a vital description, such as the color of Kate's hair, until we've already formed a picture in our own minds that then becomes hard to break. But her descriptors of a scene in general, and of subtle feeling behind a single glance or spoken word, reveal a certain depth of character that is, while not complex in development, complex in that single conflicting moment. In her novel, characters are not particularly admirable but are unfailingly human. And, in that sense, their stagnation can represent our own challenging inability to change.

--- Reviewed by Shannon Luders-Manuel (www.shannonluders.com)

"The Master Bedroom" comes without a preface to explain how Tessa Hadley hit on the idea to write a novel about a 17-year old boy who seduces a family friend, 43-year Kate Flynn, who, while the affair is going on, had designs on his father. It's the plot of "The Graduate" turned inside out. Whether or not these is any conscious parallelism between the books, "The Master Bedroom" is an elegantly told story about a woman in search of her self and the men, including the teenager, Jamie Roberts, David, his Dad, and Max her erstwhile American lover from whom she seeks direction. If they are not as baffled as she is, they are not a great deal of help either. Ultimately, she is turned back on her own resources and the reader is left to wonder whether, as she asked at the beginning of the book "her life would ever fit into the lucid shapes she planned for it."

End note. Tessa Hadley teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University in Bath, England, not far from Cardiff, Wales, the setting for this novel and the author's residence. She has published three other novels, most recently "The London Train" as well as "Sunstroke and Other Stories" which I have also reviewed and praised. If you read and enjoy "The Master Bedroom" (and its hard not to), you might also consider tracking down a copy of "In Praise of Older Women" by Stephen Vizinczey. So much depends on opportunity.

Tessa Hadley is one of the best fiction writers of our time. I probably shouldn't limit her to fiction because I'll bet the ranch she could, if she wished, write sublime poetry and non-fiction. The Master Bedroom is a lovely book. The writing is exquisite. I first disovered Hadley via one of her perfect short stories in a recent New Yorker magazine. Now I can't get enough of her work. I've ordered five books already. Bravo to a gorgeous novel, written by one of the best writers of modern time.

Other reviewers have summarized the plot and lavished well-deserved praise on this masterpiece so I feel justified in going off on some tangents. It's probably unfair and irrelevant to compare this to Trezza Azzopardi's "The Hiding Place" simply on the grounds of geography but they are both so strongly located in Cardiff and are such great novels that the parallels kept coming to mind. Tiger Bay was a mainly non-white area, with Somali and Maltese communities left from the days of Cardiff as a busy port. Azzopardi describes a horribly abusive family surviving there. Hadley's Cardiff seems pallid and refined in comparison. All her adult characters are college graduates and there is no violence except for a suicide preceding the main action, and a non-fatal car accident at the beginning. (Being even more irrelevant, was a reference to Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" intended?)