New Yorker Fiction

A WRITER'S WIT
Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy.
Phyllis McGinley
Born March 21, 1905

Hadley Wins Again

March 24, 2014, Tessa Hadley, “Under the Sign of the Moon”: Greta, in her sixties, travels by train from London to Liverpool to visit her daughter and experiences a chance encounter with a much younger man. ¶ Hadley’s greatest gift may be developing character. She so thoroughly creates interesting individuals that the plot seems to unfold as a result of their willful actions—as if they are actual people. We are drawn along with Greta from her past—two husbands, her life as a wife and mother—to the present, as a woman recovering from cancer. The young man’s attentions seem odd; she speculates he must have a mother fixation to be so attentive to her needs. At the same time she feels rejuvenated.

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 . . . the way you might describe a limb getting over an attack of pins and needles—that she was coming back to life.

When Greta has a second stranger-on-a-train encounter with the young man, he awkwardly spills his drink in her lap, and while he moves to clean her dress, he places his head on her knee. She insists that he leave the establishment immediately. He has left her a gift, a worn copy of a historical novel, in which he has written what turns out to be her name (though he'd said her name was the same as his mother's):

Greta was confused, and for one long moment she really believed that it was fated, that this stranger had known her before he ever met her, and that he had written her name inside his book before she even told him what it was.

Hadley is comfortable with Greta’s ambiguous feelings, and it feels natural because often it is the way we feel about our own lives.

The New Yorker published three of Hadley’s stories in 2013, and with this one, she gives this year a great start. Hadley’s novel Clever Girl is out now.
Benoit Paillé, Photographer

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