Tessa Hadley's Master Bedroom

What do you want out of a novel? I asked C. It was a beautiful spring evening, daylight tremulously light, just receding. We had taken care of everything we had needed to do that day, agreed to abandon things we ought to do, to spend a languid evening hour together. We shared a beer.

I want to go somewhere, he said. And I want it to articulate something for me, he added. I agreed. Yes, I said, that’s what I always thought too. I was not totally happy, saying this.

I was thinking about Tessa Hadley’s The Master Bedroom. I’ve always placed a lot of belief in a writer’s ability to articulate something, to process something for the reader. Some of my favorite writers are favorite for their uncanny knack of making the confusing precise, or at least, familiar. And the trick is especially awesome in the world of fiction where everything is as complex or basic as the author makes it. But The Master Bedroom left me in a weird kind of lull; I was removed when I wanted to be absorbed.  

The book takes place in Wales, where Kate, a fashionable and middle-aged academic, has just returned home to take care of her aging mother. Soon she crosses paths with a child hood friend and his son. Unbeknownst to the other, each man pursues Kate. The story is an oblique record of romance and of fidelity, mainly from the perspectives of these three characters.

The problem for me was not that the book did not articulate unseen things. There are passages in the book so exacting they make quick and vital cut, demonstrating motivations and conflict with so little fuss that one can almost miss it (making me wonder if perhaps her short stories might be more satisfying to me). The problem is that the narrative arc seemed to linger in these troughs so stubbornly that the crests in the story seemed probable, inevitable, and in the end, not very dangerous. The characters recover, as people do. Opportunities are missed but the only revelation in the missed opportunity is the fact of it passed. Moments converge to change a character’s life course with the certainty of the clock’s second-hand. Hadley articulates that complex something – but it is fate, a very unsurprising kind of future. Fate is inhuman, recognizable as fiction.

There is a scene near the end of the book where a character describes the viewer’s feeling of disappointment at the end of an opera.

“…found himself drawn in, despite himself, to the familiar twists and turns of misapprehension; the secrets, concealments, longings, devices, trickery, notes fastened with a pin; the promise of joys. Where else did the music come from? When it was over and the characters hurried away out of the back of the set…he was bereft. Coming back to take the applause, they were only singers and actors. [He] felt himself shut out and left behind.”

I loved this passage. And when my eye took it in, I thought, yes! I too want ask where the music comes from. That’s what I want out of a novel! But even as the characters in The Master Bedroom left the wings and the back of the set, even as they lived, I never felt left behind. I never felt absorbed enough to believe that I was going anywhere real or unexpected.