'Free Love' puts a '60s spin on a Jane Austen-style novel of manners

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Tessa Hadley's new novel "Free Love" is about a woman in middle-age grabbing hold of the freedoms of the 1960s just before they pass her by. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says that if that plot sounds too melodramatic, you haven't read Tessa Hadley.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: You need only watch a YouTube clip of any "Ed Sullivan Show" from the mid-1960s to see confirmation of Einstein's theory that past, present and future coexist simultaneously. Take Ed's infamous really big show of September 16, 1967, featuring comic Rodney Dangerfield, Great American Songbook singers Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, and The Doors. That night, the so-called silent era of the 1950s shared the stage with the psychedelic '60s. Tessa Hadley's sharp new novel, "Free Love," is about just such a moment.

When we first meet our main character, Phyllis Fischer, she's sitting at her dressing table, primping for a rather fussy dinner she's hosting that night for the son of some friends who's recently arrived in London. It's a summer evening in 1967, and Phyllis, a pretty, upper-middle-class woman on the cusp of 40, is applying pale lipstick, back combing her hair and slipping on an empire (ph) waisted mini dress, in keeping with the fashions of the day. But otherwise, Phyllis is a 1950s model wife and mother. Daily life in her gracious suburban home is as fixed as the pork terrine glazed in aspic to be served as the dinner's first course. By the end of the evening, however, Phyllis will brush up against the sexual revolution of the '60s in the form of the dinner guest, whose name is Nicky Knight - think of a minor Jim Morrison - who shows up at the Fischers' front door an hour late, stinking of nicotine, beer and insolence - irresistible.

If you haven't yet read Tessa Hadley, the shortcut way of characterizing her style is to say that she explicitly embraces Jane Austen and Henry James as literary models, but she also has the edge of a tough girl writer like Rachel Kushner - psychological depth, wit and a vein of ruthlessness, Mark Hadley's novels and short stories. She's great fun to read until the fun stops. Maybe you hear that distinctive, sudden shift of tone in this description of Phyllis's growing besottedness with Nicky over dinner.

(Reading) Every least detail of Nicky's presence seems significant for Phyllis, because she might be shut out from now on from youth and beauty - purple smudges under his eyes, taut creases that came beside his lips when he smiled to himself in irony. His movements were so loosely spontaneous, outraging all the conventions the Fishers lived by. She seemed to see their constraint and formality through his eyes. Nicky stubbed out his cigarette right in the middle of his slice of her tureen. Phyllis hadn't known that the young had this power to reduce the present of the middle aged to rubble.

The devastation of that epiphany, however, is cushioned for Phyllis, when after dinner, she and Nicky wind up drunkenly snogging in the garden as they search in the dark for a child's missing shoe. Soon enough, Phyllis is making excuses to see Nicky in his crummy flat in London, where he welcomes her adoration and sexual expertise. Hadley is such a precise writer that she depicts this situation with all the strangeness and gravitas of the real. We sense from the get-go that Phyllis will only be a chapter in the brash Nicky's life, while he will completely upend hers. Here, for instance, is Phyllis musing on her new, secretive life.

(Reading) Nicky had no history of failure and no grown up authority in the world. So when he made love to her, it was with his whole frank concentration and with such urgency as if nothing else was important. That was what Phyllis thought then, too - nothing else was important. Phyllis knew that her betrayal of her husband and children was wrong, but in the same impersonal, dulled way that she knew from school about the Treaty of Vienna or the abolition of the Corn Laws.

Out of consideration for what becomes an inventively Victorian plot full of coincidences and mistaken identities, I focused here on the central situation of "Free Love." But this is a deceptively expansive novel, filled with idiosyncratic characters and a distinctive flavor of the times. Beyond the confines of Phyllis's suburban house and Nicky's one-room flat, Hadley gives us sweeping descriptions of London in the swinging '60s, where old-fashioned elegance is giving way to crushed velvets and Indian silver jewelry. A domestic novel of manners, erotic abandon and cultural change, "Free Love" is as eclectic and alive as the times it captures.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Free Love" by Tessa Hadley.

Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we talk about organized crime in small town America. Russell Shorto, author of the memoir "Smalltime," will tell us the story of his grandfather, a mob boss in Johnstown, Pa. The story involves rackets, political payoffs and the unsolved murder of a bookie. I hope you'll join us.

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