Fair creature of an hour: Hadley's New Yorker story

Tessa Hadley maintains her status as the New Yorker's go-to gal for contemporary British fiction, and you can always count on her stories for a particular tone: highly literate even elegant (and sometimes over the top), often from the POV of an older narrator looking back on the foibles of her youth, set among intelligent professional London suburbanites who are pretty ordinary people not expectionally posh or cultured, but with just enough edginess and cockiness to set these apart from the genteel British popular fiction of another generation - and her story in current New Yorker a good example; Valentine, narrated by a woman looking back on a key relationship of her youth: she's like a million other intelligent and intellectual high-school kids circa 1970 who looks at her comfortable family and knows that's not what she wants or expects of life, but doesn't know quite where she's headed or how - and then she meets a guy ... in this case a Keats-like romantic soul who sweeps her away and introduces her to drugs and sex - he seems completely from another world, but he's not at all, his family is equally conventional. Hadley does a great job establishing this relationship - in fact, almost too great a job, she moves it along so slowly with such detail that it feels as if we're in a world of a novel, a relationship whose nuances and dimensions will grow and develop over many pages, chapters. It's not the most original of story premises - in fact, that's part of the point, hers is a fairly typical experience - and I wonder how this story would play if told from the male POV? Probably as crude and exploitative, whereas from the female POV it seems romantic and tragic. Hadley, unfortunately, seems to wake up to the idea that this story needs some kind of plot and not just an establishing premise when she's well along into it - in fact the last few paragraphs, the end already in sight - where she jams a few quick elements together, including the surprise ending that is a surprise to the narrator only (again, that's intentional - this is clearly a story in which we are meant to know more than the narrator did at the time of the events she is recounting). So this story shows Hadley's strength as a writer - her ability to plumb the depths of the mind of British youth, girls especially, during a certain time of change and turbulence - but also her weakness (which some readers might find a strength - that's a matter of taste): a casual disregard for creating an arc of story.