After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

What an amazing collection of short stories! I couldn’t find one that I did not enjoy or that did not make me wonder about my own life, those around me, and just the state of humanity as a whole. Readers who enjoy the creativity and perspective of Margaret Atwood or the incisiveness of Meg Wolitzer are likely to find Hadley’s After the Funeral and Other Stories equally as well-written, equally as insightful into the human experience. And like Atwood and Wolitzer, there is an undercurrent of the uncomfortable in this collection of Hadley’s work, something that makes one wonder about the moral state of our species.

The stories range wide in terms of their narrators and protagonists. In some stories the narrator is a child, in others adult women, adult men. These are stories that clip a slice of a group of someones lives: some pinpoint a long moment of grief or the sharp cut of a sudden loss. There is death and all the attendant fears of delivering the news of death, of getting on after the loss, of not feeling much of anything and what that means about oneself. There are stories here of indifference, a death of a different kind amongst our very social species. There are stories of disloyalty and infidelity, yet again, another kind of death. Indeed, the title of the collection, while signaling the title of one of its stories, is also telling of the content of the collection. After the Funeral and Other Stories is about what happens after there has been a resignation of some kind, a real or metaphorical death and the putting to bed of that corpse. In some of these tales, there is proof of an afterlife.

The characters in these stories do unexpected things, sometimes things that shouldn’t be done but are done anyway, with and without shame. Readers will find themselves wondering at the end of a story, “Oh, that’s just not right…. is it?” Or, is it? That is the draw of this collection of Hadley’s work.

Story aside, Hadley’s prose should also be an attraction for readers. This is delicious literary fiction; Hadley’s turns of phrase are crisp and succinct; the description of the squelch of plimsoll shoes in the rain is enough to invoke a multitude of elements necessary to the reader’s experience: a sense of activity, the image of the character, the mind of the narrator — and more profound, the poignancy of the moment.

I would normally list my favorite stories, but honestly, I enjoyed each and every one of these.