The Master Bedroom

I definitely had to push myself to finish this book. I'm not sure why I did. The main character, Kate, returns to her childhood home to care for her aging mother, leaving behind her career and life in London. From the beginning, Kate is self-absorbed, caustic and generally unlikeable. Somehow these qualities attract her best friend's brother and his son. Her sexual relationship with the under-age son is odd (and illegal in the U.S.). The ending was quite surprising to me; at long last, her arrogance and disregard for everyone else leave her alone with her problems and, worst of all, herself.

Kate Flynn returns to her childhood home in Cardiff after many successful years in London to care for her aging mother. Jobless and lonely, she enters into a slow courtship with the married brother of her best friend, David, and then an affair with the man's teenage son.

Kate is aimless and careless, pretentious and prickly. Neither she nor David are willing to expose themselves by overtly declaring affection for one another. David's wife removes herself emotionally from their marriage, but refuses to explain why. Only young Jamie is willing to show emotion and commit himself to uncertainty.

This book, while tremendously well written, is not always easy to read. The characters are so intent on keeping themselves to themselves that even show more with the authorial voice giving us clues to their inner lives, they are difficult to get to know. Kate, especially, is so intent in presenting herself as charmingly eccentric, that she is blithely unaware of the feelings of others. show less

The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley is the first book I've received through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program. Oddly, I received the book on June 11, about six weeks after the book was available in paperback, and the copy I received was an actual trade paperback, not an ARC. At any rate, I selected several books and received this one, possibly the one book I was unsure I even wanted to read. The synopsis was intriguing, but in a Jerry Springer/train wreck sort of way: Bored Kate Flynn leaves her London academic job and returns to her childhood home to care for her mother. While she is there, a married childhood friend and his seventeen-year-old son "set about their parallel courtships" and "Kate cannot quite resist either man." This show more all sounds rather seamy, in (I am happy to say) a completely inaccurate way, and I was delighted at the whim that led me to request this book. Tessa Hadley is a gifted writer of lyrical, evocative prose who has crafted a novel (her third) that is touching, funny, and complex.

Kate is both sympathetic and infuriating in her midlife crisis. Hadley has drawn her as a woman who has come untethered; though she has taken a one-year leave of absence instead of quitting her job and let her flat instead of giving it up completely, there is a sense that these steps are just delaying the inevitable. Speaking to David, a public health doctor, she calls her academic life "a kind of dream, a mistake. A life lost in books. What an abyss of difference, between your usefulness and mine. How did I choose it: this play life? I should have been a nurse. We carelessly make one choice after another and our lives pile up." She is not always nice, to put it bluntly, and there were times I didn't like her. Though her purported reason for moving home to Wales is her aging mother, it's clear that her mother is a means of escape from a life she had thought she wanted. When she first comes home, she finds her mother asleep and nearly decides to drive back to London without waking her, and she can be sharp with her mother. She takes her childhood friend Carol (who should be nominated for sainthood) for granted. She throws a lavish party purely to spite the practical David and his wife, Suzie. She tells seventeen-year-old Jamie, who has fallen in love with her, that he's too young to be her friend. But despite all these flaws, or perhaps because they make her real, I hoped that she would find what she was looking for by the end. I was expecting, rather dejectedly, for the story to end without any meaning found, without the hollows of life being filled, and I was both surprised and satisfied by the ending. Kate remakes her life, but not in any trite way, nor in the way I had expected.

This is a quiet book, with many small movements rather than a single dramatic action. Hadley's prose is well-suited to the story (or rather, stories, as the subplots share a dance floor with Kate's midlife crisis, even if they don't cut in), with simple, accurate language, like this description of her reunion with David: "They were falling into a pattern of friendship that had been, before Kate came back to live in Cardiff, exactly her idea of the sort of thing that would evolve in a place like this between grown-up cultured people" and elegant description, as when she first arrives at home: "The falling rain was blotted up overhead by the tall monkey puzzle tree or pattered onto the evergreen bushes. Below, on the lake, an invisible duck blundered splashily. A cold perfume of pines and bitter garden mulch seemed to her like the smell of the past itself." I marked dozens of pages where I found beautiful, lyrical prose or turns of phrase so elegant and perfect they made me smile. Hadley is funny, too. David's wife has fallen in with new hippie friends, and this is his parenthetical description of Menna and Neil's old van when they come to take Suzie camping: "its puttering filthy exhaust more polluting, surely, than anything they could make up for with their puritanical veganism." After Jamie cuts the grass, she tells him, "I think it looked better with the grass long. That grass was beautiful, it blew in the wind, it was blond like hair, the sound it made was like the sea. Now what does it look like? Stubbled and ugly, a poor cropped head." When Jamie looks crestfallen, she laughs.

The word "hollow" and variations on it appear too many times to count, and this is no coincidence. At forty-three, Kate feels hollow, that her life is empty. She doesn't take care of herself; she smokes and drinks, but rarely eats. The return to Wales doesn't immediately help; she reflects that "She had screwed up her own professional life as if it didn't matter and stepped outside it into where she was no one." She talks of being unmoored, of longing to be broken down and remade. Even literature is hollow: "Nothing written now has enough in it. I have to swap about, as soon as I get the hang of what they're up to; they're only ever up to one thing at a time." This is certainly not the case with this novel. In addition to Kate's search for meaning, we have glimpses into David and Suzie's failing marriage, Billie's failing health, Jamie's youthful search for meaning in his life (which makes for an interesting contrast to Kate's). This is the sort of book that I would have loved writing papers on in college. The story is unbelievably rich, and I could easily make this review pages and pages long, but I'll stop here. I'd recommend this book to anyone who looking for a rich, complex novel about the human experience, written in gorgeous, decadent prose.

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On the downside, I didnt really like any of the characters in this contemporary study of post-feminist angst in London. The main character is selfish and narcisstic and way too cavalier with the feelings of others. And the other characters all seem a bit two-dimensional and also flawed in their own unique and not particularly appealing ways. However, the author does ascuh an exceptional job of setting up the social train wreck of her life as the bad choices multiply that I found it to be an irresistable page turner--especially after the main plot is established.

I received this novel as part of Library Thing's Early Reviewers program and truthfully would have given up on it about halfway through if I'd just been reading it for myself. At first, I found it quite engaging -- witty, well-written dialogue and Kate, a main character whose eccentricities I thought would be entertaining throughout. But as I got further in, the plot seemed stagnant and I realized there wasn't much to like to about Kate or any of the other characters.

Another reviewer noted that Hadley didn't reveal enough about the other characters for readers to really get involved with them and I agree. Carol seemed likeable and I wanted to know more about her, but she was relegated to sidekick and just a convenience to getting David show more into the story. This novel is a quick read and the dialogue is very well-written. I found myself turning down the corners of a few pages so I could go back and re-read some of the best parts later. However, it isn't a novel that will stay with me or one that I'd keep in my library. show less

This is a dark, moody book. Kate, the main character, is spoiled, self-centered, shallow, and mean. David, another pivotal character, is uptight and also selfish in his own way. Jamie, David's 17-year-old son, has a big role in the book and also does some questionable things, but he at least has the excuse of having a mother who committed suicide and his age. So why did I give it 4 1/2 stars? The storyline itself was compelling, and it was like watching a car accident in slow motion. You want to look away because you know things are going to end badly, but you just can't. The ending is good. Most of the loose ends are tied up but not too tightly to make it unrealistic.

The Master Bedroom is an intimate drama centered on a middle-aged woman who becomes romantically entangled with a married man and his son during the year she returns to her childhood home to care for her elderly mother. Hadley excels at describing the small details of human interactions (the handshake that lingers longer than necessary, the purposeful brush of contact, the subtle change of voice). There aren’t any soap operatic scenes in The Master Bedroom, but Hadley nevertheless creates a quiet kind of dramatic tension that quickly propels the plot. In addition to Hadley’s narrative finesse, her well-crafted prose makes The Master Bedroom a joy to read. Highly recommended.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License (short show more reviews, real opinions): litlicense.blogspot.com show less