Book review
After the Funeral and Other Stories, by Tessa Hadley
There’s an idea from philosopher Walter Benjamin that the image of the past can only be seized the way you catch a flash of light—for one instant, right when you recognize it, and then it’s gone for good. Hadley seems to write by that idea. Her short stories don’t sit inside the big moment—the wedding, the death, the split; they sit just after it, or just before, in that stretch where nothing much is happening on the outside, but everything is stirring underneath. Shifting, you might say, the way the weather shifts.
After the Funeral and Other Stories (2023) centers dailyness and abounds with detail, but only the necessary kind. Every small observation is doing real work, placing a character so precisely in their home, their family, their social milieu, that the setting starts to explain who they are (think Chekov or Balzac for a nineteenth-century analog). Nobody is a hero or a villain, nobody fully understands themselves, let alone anyone else. The crisis, when it comes, is small and domestic: a sibling relationship that’s gone slightly off, a mother’s love landing at the wrong angle, a child devastated over a forgotten (and never-to-be-retrieved) set of dolls, totally inconsolable in the moment, despite the shinier toys that are bound to replace the old.
Nobody is a hero or a villain, nobody fully understands themselves, let alone anyone else.
Why it matters for leaders
Hadley’s people are always more than the role they have been given. So are the people on your team. The book is a quiet exercise in the attention it takes to notice that.
Patient attention is the engine of the book. Each character’s perception is unique and draws you in, if only to reveal a mismatch between what a character thinks is happening and what’s really happening. A person’s face that used to look unfinished, still becoming itself, is shown here already closed off, set by time and by forces the person never chose. Children complicate a household endlessly by having their own minds no one else can fully enter. Hadley writes about a kind of vanished, child-like way of seeing the world with tenderness and an awareness that once you’ve grown past it, you can’t get back in.
The relationships that might seem like they should be the center of the book—the couples, the marriages—are often treated as incidental, almost beside the point. What she’s interested in is siblings, parents and children, the family relations that you don’t choose, don’t end, and remain insolvable. And what she keeps circling back to is people being revealed (to themselves or to each other) as far more complicated than the role they’ve been assigned, always slipping a little past whatever definition the people around them are trying to pin them to.
A few questions worth sitting with before you pick it up
- 1Why do the quiet moments in a family, the ones where nothing seems to “happen,” often seem to matter more than the big ones?
- 2How well do you actually know the people you’re closest to (your siblings, your parents, your kids) outside of the role of kin they play in your life?
- 3Is there a piece of your childhood, such as a game, a world you took completely seriously, that’s now impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t there?
- 4What pulls your attention away from the people right in front of you; and what does it take to notice them again?
In short
- Hadley writes the moment just before or just after the big event, where the real shift happens.
- The relationships that matter here are the ones you don’t choose: siblings, parents, children.
- Read it for the patient attention it asks of you, and then turns back on the people around you.
