Hadley's Quiet Form

Here is a short review of Tessa Hadley’s Free Love, out now, at Bookforum. I’ve long been interested in Hadley’s approach to the British novel, in part because I see her as offering an interesting corrective to the idea that formal experiment must look a certain way. Her novels “look” quite conventional — the narration is stable, distant; the characters and their situations are familiar. But at their core, Hadley’s novels trouble very stable conventions of family plotting, especially those drawn from Freud. This novel is no exception to that habit, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.