Publisher's Weekly Review
The poignant, ironic latest from Hadley (Late in the Day) is drenched in the atmosphere of late-1960s Britain, when the lives of women seemed to be changing radically, but maybe, in fact, weren't so much. In 1967, Phyllis Fischer is 40 years old, "pleased with her life" as a housewife in suburban London, married to civil servant Roger, and mother to charming nine-year-old Hugh and discontented 15-year-old Colette. But, as the detached, observant narrator notes, "under the placid surface of suburbia, something was unhinged." Soon Phyllis is involved, to Colette's chagrin, in an affair with Nicholas, the 20-something son of family friends. What seems at first to be a simple tale of adultery and its consequences twists into something between a "cosmic comedy" (as Nicholas's mother calls it) and a "situation as fatally twisted as a Greek drama" (according to the narrator) as the affair reveals unexpected connections between Phyllis's family and Nicholas's. The narrator's wise, disaffected view of life homes in on the shakiness of Phyllis's sentimental education. In keen, lush prose, Hadley conveys the many ways her characters delude themselves amid fraught relationships between parents and children as well as between lovers. The result is sumptuous and surprising. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
The energy in a Tessa Hadley novel typically flows from a character's unvoiced longing or suppressed desire, gestured at in flashback over the course of a present-day narrative seamlessly encompassing the previous half-century, as in 2015's The Past or 2019's Late in the Day, titles that sum up the mood, if not the excitement, of her work. At first glance, Free Love breaks with all that. It takes us from 1967 into 1968 in the company of a flighty middle-aged mother of two, Phyllis, who quits married life in the stockbroker belt with a Foreign Office high-up after falling for a mouthy young dinner guest, Nicky, the would-be revolutionary son of family friends working in oil. An after-dinner search for a child's missing sandal supplies the pretext for a clinch in the dusk; soon, Phyllis is knocking on the door of Nicky's rundown flat in eye-openingly multicultural west London every Wednesday, under cover of visiting her father in Leamington Spa. If there's folly here, it's part of the novel's trick to tempt us to see it as belonging only to Phyllis, when the tangled roots of the situation truly lie elsewhere. As Hadley shifts fluently between the points of view of the various parties involved, the novel turns as much on long-buried family secrets as it does the yearnings of itchy-footed middle age. Each member of Phyllis's household, including her children, Colette, 16, and Hugh, nine, know something the others don't; we're in the dark, too, thanks to a twist that rests on Hadley not quite playing fair when, halfway through, the novel first accesses the thoughts of her husband, Roger. Hadley's complex sentences are purring marvels of engineering, always weighted just so, cut-glass English with a continental inflection, fond of a comma splice, the dialogue marked with a dash. A brilliant writer of interiority who can also do great scenes, she has a gift, especially, for portraying the state of wanting to be wanted, or simply to be seen - a recurring longing in her fiction, whose characters often have cause to be careful what they wish for. We see Phyllis, aching and raw, privately exulting while getting the dinner on back at home; we see the electric thrill of a touch of hands between long-separated lovers; or Colette, drunk, wanting to go "all the way" with a man, "her consciousness swooping over her like a hawk". If she shares a theme with Martin Amis and Michel Houellebecq - the pros and cons of the sexual revolution - her method couldn't be more different: not comic grotesque or authorial hypothesis, but patiently inhabiting her characters, leaving it to us to gauge how their actions are shaped by the weight of experience, a technique that can't help but elicit readerly sympathy. Yes, Nicky's political grandstanding puts us in mind of Citizen Smith - when Phyllis extols the virtues of the NHS, he replies: "Keeps the factory workers healthy, so they can work for longer" - but Phyllis's awakening at his hands isn't mocked, exactly; Hadley's too subtle, too generous for that. The climax supplies heady drama as well as the warm-hearted sense that no problem is too great to be worked through; as Roger tells a confidante, "It's rather more like something out of a comic opera than Anna Karenina". Still, we know he's putting a brave face on it - we've seen him moping under Colette's watchful eye - and he also isn't yet fully aware exactly what's going on, thanks to that aforementioned twist, a left turn back into familiar Hadley country of roads not taken. It's long become customary for Hadley's reviewers to point out that she's flagrantly undersung - never longlisted for the Booker, for instance - yet the emerging consensus this time round seems to be that Free Love is below par. Call me soft but I don't see it: almost every page struck me anew with some elegant phrasing, feline irony or shrewdly sympathetic insight. The real wonder is that she does this pretty much every three years; it's easy to become ungrateful.
Booklist Review
London in 1967 is all Carnaby Street, kohl-eyed girls, and lanky lads in brocade vests. It's a terrible time to be a 40-year-old mother of two stagnating in a cozy house on the outskirts, but that's just what Phyllis Fischer is. With her stodgy Foreign Office husband, precocious son, and moody teenage daughter, Phyllis is content enough, she supposes, until the evening the twentysomething son of her husband's friend comes for dinner. Nicky is louche, disdainful, and borderline rude, but when he and Phyllis steal a kiss, it ignites a passion that Phyllis assumed was well in her past. Their affair quickly ends the Fischers' marriage and launches an adventurous life for Phyllis in London's swinging counter-culture--think The Graduate told from Mrs. Robinson's point of view. Hadley (Late in the Day, 2019) creates a palpable longing and beguiling innocence in her sensuous depiction of the giddy headiness of rediscovered love, the aching distraction of physical desire, and the agonizing rationalization of selfish decisions that will upend others' lives. With a truth-twisting revelation sure to evoke a throaty "OMG!" cry of amazement, Hadley's indelible portrait of a woman defying conventions in pursuit of personal fulfillment flawlessly captures a signature time with timeless sensitivity and passion.
Library Journal Review
It might be 1967 England, but the conventional Fischers--dedicated mom Polly; Roger, a Foreign Office careerist and loving father; and their teenage children, smart Collette and savvy Hugh--aren't exactly swinging. At least not until the son of an old friend comes to dinner and drunkenly kisses Polly, which sets her on fire and ends up subverting the entire family. From Windham-Campbell Prize winner Hadley; with a 40,000-copy first printing.
