HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Everything Will be All Right by Tessa Hadley
Loading...

Everything Will be All Right (original 2003; edition 2004)

by Tessa Hadley (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1134239,609 (3.69)4
Joyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way. For Joyce, art school provides an escape route, and there she falls in love with one of her teachers. When she marries and has children, she is determined to manage her relationship with a new freedom, and to save herself from the mistakes of the previous generation. But her daughter Zoe, growing up, comes to see Joyce as a bourgeois housewife, and when Zoe has a baby of her own, she demands more from motherhood...… (more)
Member:wigsonthegreen
Title:Everything Will be All Right
Authors:Tessa Hadley (Author)
Info:Jonathan Cape Ltd (2004), 436 pages
Collections:Read in 2016 (inactive), Fiction
Rating:****
Tags:Read 2016

Work Information

Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley (2003)

None
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 4 mentions

Showing 4 of 4
In this early novel, Hadley's usual beautifully written and cuttingly observed detailing of ordinary lives lacks the punch of some of her later works, but its still a pleasure to read. ( )
  AmberMcWilliams | Dec 28, 2016 |
A novel that spans more than fifty years of lived experience, unless it is bound to a singular protagonist, will need to focus on first one individual and then another and then another. Who the author chooses to put principally in our gaze becomes as significant, at times, as what they end up saying and doing. Here, Tessa Hadley traces a line through a series of women, mother to daughter, through four generations. But of course over that many generations there will also be a host of other candidates, in this case also mostly women, who might have been equally worthy of further attention. And likewise there will be themes that take on the centre stage while others just as enticing wait patiently off-stage. Sometimes these choices will coalesce into a tightly wound cord of character, action, and theme. Sometimes these choices will result in a diffuse sprawl. The latter is the case in this novel. The question is whether a bit of sprawl is a weakness in itself, especially if, as might be hinted here, life itself just does tend towards sprawl.

The women catching Tessa Hadley’s eye begin with Lil, whose husband died on the beaches during the disaster that was Dunkirk. Lil’s oldest daughter, Joyce, the picks up the author’s gaze when she is a teenager, eventually heading off to art college and marrying one of her drawing instructors. Joyce’s daughter, Zoe, takes over for a time until we end up with Zoe’s daughter, Pearl. Each of these women has different aspirations and inclinations. They tend towards a fierce intelligence that emerges in varying forms. And although they have very different temperaments, there is an inescapable sense of sameness across them. A bit Radio 4? A bit Women’s Hour? Perhaps it’s just the curse of living in a thoroughly moderated and modulated class-bound society. How could they hope to be distinctive? And that raises a slight problem, because the women in the larger tale who really are distinctive, such as Lil’s sister Vera, are shunted off to the sidelines. Or at least it seems that way.

And how do the men fare in such a novel? Not well. Not well, at all. Across the generations, it seems like Lil, whose husband dies at Dunkirk, has just about the best that can be hoped for from a man. Even the one relationship that persists, between Joyce and Ray, shows Ray as overbearing and egotistical and, frankly, insufferable. One rather wishes that he could have met his Dunkirk as well. And that goes double for Zoe’s partner, Simon. But the one who tops them all is Vera’s husband, Dick, who totally lives up to his name.

It doesn’t sound like a recipe for a thoroughly engrossing novel, does it? And yet, I found it so. It is variable, certainly. At times the tone and level of seriousness switches into a different key, if you will, without seeming to want to sustain it. But overall it remains a colourful canvas of women, the choices some of them make, and the consequences of those choices. ( )
  RandyMetcalfe | Dec 8, 2014 |
I have just finished reading Tessa Hadley's Everythings will be All Right. Oh I do wish it would have been.

Even though there were sentences and expressions within, which I found to be very insightful, I found the whole experience of reading the book a terrible chore.

It basically was the life history of three generations of women, seen through their eyes. Their life's were full of self-inflicted grief, and it really was an account of how they got themselves into scrapes and out again, mostly involving men, and a baby thrown in for good measure (not to mention the death from meningitus).

It isn't a book I would recommend, I only finished it because I set myself the task, which felt more like hard labour, and because I met the author, who I found very interesting, unlike her tale - which appears was loosely biographical tales from her family. I also took it's promise on the cover at face value...

"Everything will be alright" - well I wished it had been, but unfortunately it wasn't. Shani 21.09.06 ( )
  Phethean | Sep 20, 2006 |
Everything Will Be All Right: A Novel by Tessa Hadley (2004)
  michelestjohn | Mar 26, 2010 |
Showing 4 of 4
no reviews | add a review
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
For Mum
First words
Pearl contemplates herself.
Quotations
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English

None

Joyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way. For Joyce, art school provides an escape route, and there she falls in love with one of her teachers. When she marries and has children, she is determined to manage her relationship with a new freedom, and to save herself from the mistakes of the previous generation. But her daughter Zoe, growing up, comes to see Joyce as a bourgeois housewife, and when Zoe has a baby of her own, she demands more from motherhood...

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.69)
0.5
1 1
1.5
2
2.5
3 5
3.5 4
4 14
4.5
5 2

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,186,293 books! | Top bar: Always visible