SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A quartet of siblings and assorted spouses, lovers and friends all spent a holiday in the English family summerhouse they'll have to sell. Do you think everything will go just swell for those three weeks or will tensions simmer, secrets break out of storage as quarrels, tears and fatal attractions roil the old house in the summer heat? Tessa Hadley's novel, "The Past," has already been praised in Britain and now in the U.S. where her stories frequently appear in The New Yorker. Tessa Hadley joins us from the studios of the BBC in Oxford. Thanks so much for being with us.
TESSA HADLEY: It's a pleasure.
SIMON: Does setting the story in a house give the novelist a kind of stage?
HADLEY: Yes. I mean, first of all, a house is like a metaphor. Before you even start, you don't have to even work on it. There is a building that's had a family in it and they've been there for a couple of generations now. And they gather in those rooms and on the walls are certain pictures and everything is sort of helping you to make your story. I love putting stories in houses.
SIMON: Help us meet some of the characters. The sisters first. Harriet is the oldest - an old student radical.
HADLEY: Yeah, I'm interested in what became of, I suppose, actually the people of my generation who some of them, not me, but some of whom were so passionately sure a new world was coming and that almost any kind of sacrifice was worth it in the name of a better world. But there's something sad about Harriet, something missing, something - some lost part of her life.
SIMON: Alice, the middle sister, is - and who wouldn't be - just a little anxious about growing old.
HADLEY: Yes, she's sort of single, though she's had lots of lovers, and she's childless and she hasn't really got a career. And in a way - I sort of love the way novels like people like that.
SIMON: Fran is a teacher and a mother of two. Let me just ask you, not to dismiss her in any way, are the differences between the sisters both the source of their tensions and their partnership ultimately?
HADLEY: Yes. I mean, speaking as a writer, of course, if you gather four siblings, three sisters, in a house and you want to do something with them, you're going to be working with how different they are from one another as well as working with what binds them. But everything interesting is in the difference, isn't it?
SIMON: Does a novel start for you with characters or story?
HADLEY: It often starts with a scene. And it did, this one did very vividly. And I've no idea what strange place in my subconscious this surfaced from. But I saw the scene where this slightly sad and solitary Harriet totally accidentally witnessed her brother making love to his new wife. Not quite literally witnessed, but a door is open, she catches sight of her reflection, she can hear things. And she's sort of excruciated, the way one is when those silly accidents happen. But more than that...
SIMON: This is Roland, her brother, the philosopher and not just a philosopher, huh?
HADLEY: That's right. He's a philosopher and a bit of a man about the scene and a bit of a film critic. And he's brought his very attractive, brand-new wife to the house with him to meet his family. And she's the catalyst that in a novel you drop into a steady scene to precipitate something completely new. And it's Harriet's eavesdropping on her brother making love to this new woman that sort of tears something open that was sealed up inside Harriet.
SIMON: I made a note of a line. Roland, at one point, wonders, quote, "whether mutual incomprehension might not be the most stimulating arrangement in a marriage." (Laughter) I've been trying to figure that out. Well, let me just get you to talk about that.
HADLEY: OK (laughter). Well, the reason - there's another bit where I'm kind of on the same theme, which really interests me, where I go back into the past and the grandparents of my four siblings are also having one of those moments. And it sort of says the woman had thought that when she was married she would be intimately known to somebody and intimately know him. And actually to save yourself inside a marriage, you need layers of guardedness. Maybe that's just me, but being attracted to the unknown in the other person and not trying to colonize it or wanting to be colonized or sort of wanting to become one country, if you know what I mean, I think that may help.
SIMON: Oh, but there's that old line from "The Russia House," I believe, where the man says to the woman, you are my country. I think it's the - one of the most romantic things I've ever heard.
HADLEY: I wonder what the woman thought as she heard him say that. (Laughter) What a lovely line, that's for sure. But I think it's very good because it's very true to something that happens in love. But I'm not sure that it's a very good blueprint for what happens in marriage.
SIMON: Obviously there's a lot of tension in this book between siblings, the whole cast of characters. But somehow at the end, I am not left with a doubt that they'll somehow be back together next summer.
HADLEY: I think that's a good subject for writing about because really, as many families work as don't work or they don't work some of the time, but lots of the time they do. And I suppose the Western world went through a deep disenchantment with the family in the mid-20th century for very good reasons. You know, it can be an extremely oppressive institution. But actually I think we're probably in a period of recuperating it now. We love it. So I kind of love to write about families getting on together but not blandly. I mean, there's a challenge to writing, how much easier to write people falling out than falling in. But we need it on record that people also love each other and then hate each other and then love each other again.
SIMON: Tessa Hadley - her novel is "The Past." Thanks so much for being with us.
HADLEY: Thank you so much for having me.