Tessa Hadley, in After the Funeral, is at home with the short story because she is a master of non-elaboration. She leaves it to her readers to fill in the gaps, make judgments on the quiet. The pleasure is not unlike reading Jane Austen: we have the inside track on what is being said – we know more about her characters than they know about themselves. She pulls off the feat of being leisurely yet economical – there is no slack. As one of our finest novelists, she has, throughout her writing life, been a short story supremo, publishing three or four collections and contributing to the New Yorker since 2002. It is hard to imagine stories more skilfully paced and polished than these.
The funeral, in the title story, is for Philip Lyons, a pilot. He was distant as a family man and his young daughters are not shattered by his death, but Marlene, his wife, is devastated, not least because he died in a New York hotel room in compromising circumstances (the implications of which are left for us to guess at). Hadley oversees mourners and introduces the mother-in-law in a calculatedly nonjudgmental sentence as someone who “collected old Delft and read all the new novels and taught piano”. A blameless specimen – we instantly suspect we are unlikely to share her high opinion of herself.
