After the Funeral and Other Stories

March 1, 2023

In After the Funeral and Other Stories, Windham-Campbell honoree Hadley shows how events can reverberate for a lifetime, as when a woman meets someone connected to her father's death decades later and long-estranged sisters ignore each other when they inadvertently meet at a fancy hotel. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 8, 2023
Hadley (Free Love) proves herself a magician of short fiction with this wonderful collection featuring characters whose epiphanies shift their conception of their lives. Many of the stories feature POV switches, coincidental encounters, and other literary devices that might not have worked if Hadley weren’t so good at capturing moments of startling strangeness. In “Cecelia Awakened,” a teenager travels with her parents to Florence, Italy, where she realizes they’re simply tourists—at once outlandish and utterly unoriginal. While checking into their hotel, she picks up a flash of disdain from the manager directed at her father (“It was as if Cecelia had heard distinctly, in a moment when no one else was actually speaking, idle thought: Fussy little man”). In “Dido’s Lament,” a Londoner named Lynette quite literally bumps into her ex-husband, Toby, on the subway. A power play ensues when Toby invites Lynette to visit his new house. After Lynette leaves, Hadley shifts to Toby’s perspective, where in his shame he has an unsettling thought about his new family and success. “The Other One” follows a girl whose grief over her father’s death via car accident becomes complicated when it comes out that he was driving with his mistress and her female friend. Many years later, at a dinner party, the girl (now a woman) believes she has bumped into the mistress’s friend, the eponymous “other one,” toward whom she feels oddly warm. Readers will marvel over these twisty and masterly tales.

June 1, 2023
A wedding, a dinner party, a vacation, and, yes, a funeral--all are worthy backdrops for celebrated fiction writer Hadley's exquisite examination of humanity's most perplexing foibles in her return to the short story. Jealousy and grief, regret and remorse, recrimination and apology are the familiar emotions and startling incentives negotiated as her protagonists confront life's quotidian moments and abrupt deviations. In "Men," two estranged sisters catch glimpses of each other in an old hotel yet fail to connect in person, stirring suppressed childhood memories. A misfit stepchild is rescued from an unsavory home in "Funny Little Snake," while a teenager's uncharacteristic moodiness upends an otherwise humdrum Italian holiday in "Cecelia's Awakening." The details surrounding her father's death years earlier become even murkier for the heroine of "The Other One." Hadley's short fiction shimmers with crystalline features of time, place, and character, and snaps with O'Henry-like electric diversions. Her characters' motivations are mysteries even unto themselves, as is cunningly displayed in the title story, in which a widow's affair with her boss snares her daughter in unforeseen ways.

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Starred review from May 1, 2023
Families come in many varieties, all of them equally fraught, in a dozen new stories from British writer Hadley. Feckless bohemian parents get withering portraits in "My Mother's Wedding" (not her first, needless to say) and "Funny Little Snake"; the latter is a particularly poignant tale of a neglected 9-year-old girl and a second wife who reluctantly comes to feel responsible for her. These two stories, like many in the collection, stop rather than end with people poised on the brink of change and no guarantees things will turn out well. Hadley's work, very much in the realistic tradition of classic English fiction, is old-fashioned in the best sense: Characters' personalities and backstories are fully drawn and set against thickly detailed physical and social surroundings. The childhood home where three middle-aged sisters assemble to visit their hospitalized mother in "The Bunty Club" is "a stolid Victorian villa" set on a hillside dotted with houses "intended to accommodate a certain sort of privileged, discreet, unexceptional, unchanging middle-class existence--which had changed after all, because it hardly existed any longer." Hadley shifts through each of the at-odds sisters' perspectives, a frequent technique of hers to remind us that people's inner lives do not necessarily match others' views of them. This is particularly effective in "Dido's Lament," which portrays a chance encounter between a former husband and wife almost entirely from her point of view until the very end, when a glimpse into his thoughts shows that the comfortable, affluent post-divorce existence she has glimpsed with chagrin is "all so that [she] could get to visit it some day, and see that he'd managed to have a life without her." The mastery she has honed over a decades-long career makes Hadley's gaze as sharp as her empathy is expansive; each tale feels as satisfying as a full-length novel despite--or perhaps because of--the ambiguous endings. A pleasure to read, with characters and themes that linger long after the final page.

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July 1, 2023

Strained family relationships lie at the heart of these stories from Story Prize finalist Hadley (Free Love; Bad Dreams and Other Stories), set in time periods from the 1960s to the present. Hippies figure prominently in a number of them; barefoot and tie-dyed, they embrace free love but are careless with relationships. In "My Mother's Wedding," with plans underway for a medieval-style marriage celebration, teenage Janey heaps scorn on the proceedings while secretly pining away for the young bridegroom. In "Funny Little Snake," second wife Valerie is resentfully saddled with the care of her odd little stepdaughter while her self-important husband begs off with too much work to do. When the weeklong visit ends, Valerie's relief turns to dismay when she realizes that the girl's mother's home is one of filth and neglect. In the title story, following the sudden death of her husband a hapless wife finds herself and her daughters in vastly reduced circumstances. As she attempts to curry favor with her married employer, she is unaware that her daughter is doing the same thing. VERDICT Good short stories are complete and satisfying in themselves while leaving open the possibility of a continuing storyline; Hadley's stories do both very well.--Barbara Love

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