I have just finished Tessa Harley’s “Late in the Day” and I have a few observations about it but also on the wider “Hampstead Novel” sub genre.
I decided to read this book because I had read a few of Hadley’s short stories and liked them. When I read a review on The Guardian. they adamantly said this wasn’t a Hampstead novel. I’d never heard this term before but they describe it as “a middle-class morality novel – probably involving adultery and shallow-masquerading-as-deep”. Ok I thought.
Cut to me finishing the book and I couldn’t possibly think of a more appropriate label for it. Everyone in it is some sort of artist; a painter, a poet, a writer, a professor, a gallery owner, a sculptor, and a rock star to name a few. That’s fine but these characters are so shallow, morally grotesque and far from any reality I’m aware of it might as well be set on a different planet. To be fair I’m Irish, and maybe it’s a cultural thing, but I did live in England and it still feels far from reality.
As an example; there’s a scene where two of the main characters are sitting in the living room listening to classical music and reading together. I guess my question is, do people actually do this? Do people sit together, reading intellectual novels in lamplit seclusion while classical music plays in the background, it struck me immediately as an intentional attempt at introducing the characters as intellectual. Another example is when one of the characters is frustrated and describes her husband to her friend as “inexorable”, again, what? Who would do that? I know these are just two examples of this intellectual peacocking that goes on throughout the book, but honestly, people slum it here by making a dinner from food they buy at the farmers market.
I left the book feeling a little insulted at the arrogance of it, like the author was trying to convince me that there is a better world out there, that I will never experience, but don’t worry “we” have our own difficulties with love and so on.
Every character in this book is horrendous, they are self obsessed assholes fucking each other with no loyalty to family or friends, but somehow we’re expected to empathise with them? It could be that I’m a working class oik with a chip on my shoulder but are these types of novels in any way realistic?
So anyway, that’s my rant, have you read a “Hampstead novel”? What’s your experience of them?
by JoyousDiversion2
2 Comments
Isn’t part of the point and pleasure of reading to experience situations and characters that don’t directly parallel our own experience or reflect our own aspirations?
Anyhow, I personally couldn’t think of anything I would like better than a relationship where we read together with quiet music in the background.
I think this probably does describe a certain milieu accurately and you being a “working class oik” probably does have something to do with it, but *doesn’t invalidate your opinion*-there were a lot of writers writing from that point of view, the ‘Angry Young Men’ had a moment a few decades back.
A lot of literary fiction these days (probably due to consolidation) does have that upper-middle-class vibe, mostly because that’s who’s writing and getting published. They’re sensitive about it, as often artists are about their art, so they try to claim they’re unique and special. You’re not imagining it.
Probably the American equivalent would be ‘Park Slope novel’, ‘Upper West Side novel’ or ‘Hamptons novel’.