Product Description

An improbable coincidence brings Clare back into contact with someone she once had sex with at a teenage party; complicatedly, he is now going out with her best friend, Helly. The encounter needn't have meant anything - it could just have been funny, or embarrassing - but it seems to have the power to shake up everything in Clare's life. Clare is married with three small children, she bakes her own bread and buys her own clothes from the charity shop. Helly is an actress and has her golden curves pasted up on billboards ten foot high. And each of them seems to want what the other has. Clare's story is intertwined with other stories of her extended family. Her father has been married three times and left a trail of children. "Accidents in the Home" dips in and out of the lives of this complicated, close, fraight family, reaching out into the past for explanation and illumination as well as across the present. It is the debut of a quite formidable fictional talent.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #332506 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Tessa Hadley teaches at Bath Spa University and lives in Cardiff.

Excerpted from Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Lost and Found The weekend that Helly brought her new boyfriend down to meet Clare, Clare's younger brother Toby was also staying with them, following them round with his video camera, making a documentary about the family for his college course.
Clare gave the camera one quick exasperated glance when the doorbell rang and the guests arrived. The food should have been ready but she was still chopping hurriedly amidst a debris of vegetable leavings; her fingers were stuck with parsley bits.

--Oh Toby, stop it!
Her deep glance at the camera - she looks at the lens and not at Toby, as if it was his eyes - is caught forever on the tape. She is wishing she had had time to change into the nicer clothes she had planned. Her hair is in a short, thick black plait on her shoulder, fastened with a rubber band. She looks tired. When she is tired (she believes) all those things which, at her best, make her look like an intellectual just make her look like a librarian: small eyes, neat straight brows, thin lips, a square high forehead. She has good skin but it is pink and hot because she is flustered. Her glance is naked and hostile - her last moment of free expression before she has to put on a smiling face.
She might be hostile to Toby; she is sometimes bossy and arbitrary with him.
Or perhaps to Helly, who comes and finds her out in her humiliation, dragged down by the children, without make-up, with wet red hands.
When Helly introduced her new boyfriend to Clare she said:
--You two should know each other. David comes from round here too. We must have all been at teenage parties together. He knows people we knew.
But the man was a stranger, an alien in Clare's house, with sunglasses hiding his eyes and an exaggerated presence she flinched from, curvy big cheekbones and chin with blue-black stubble, a thick beautiful leather coat, loudly and confidently friendly in a way that suggested immediately to Clare that he didn't want to be here in the provinces visiting his girlfriend's friend who was nobody. When they all kissed, the Londoners smelled expensively of bathrooms full of bottles of scents and lotions, and Clare was aware of her limp T-shirt which had soaked up the smells of the onion soup she was making for their lunch. The onion soup, with Parmesan toasts baked in the oven, would be delicious. (It was.) And Helly couldn't cook. But Clare feared that everything brilliant and savoury about her might appear to have drained into that onion soup, leaving her wan and dull and domesticated.
Helly was her best friend.
Recently, Helly had been paid thirty thousand pounds (twice as much as Bram, Clare's partner, earned in a year) to make a series of television advertisements for ice cream; as well as on television, they were used in the cinema and on hoardings. Everywhere Clare went she was surprised out of her reverie by Helly's golden face or the misty curves of Helly's body, intently and extravagantly inviting her into a larger-than-life golden vanilla space concealed inside the prose of everyday. These images got in the way for a while whenever she was with the real Helly: the real Helly would even seem for the first few minutes slightly contracted, smaller and more precise than she should be, and muffled in surprising clothes.
Helly was embarrassed about the advert. She was a serious actress. She did get work, in fringe and in soaps, but not enough. She was still waiting for her break. And no one, no one, could have turned down thirty thousand pounds. The advertisements paid for the serious work: that was the theory. But her friends couldn't help feeling that something momentous had happened, that she had stepped into a golden current of money and frivolity and glamour that would carry her off. Anyway, she wasn't strikingly talented as an actress. Although none of them quite acknowledged it, this was more exciting, really, than if Helly had got a good part in a play. They watched to see what would happen next.
Clare could remember that when she and Helly were fifteen, one of their shared night-time fantasies had been to imagine their nakedness projected lingeringly onto a cinema screen in front of an audience. So she couldn't be sure just how genuine Helly's contemptuous indifference was to those golden simulacra plastered everywhere. Or how genuine her own contemptuous indifference was, either.
The two visitors filled up the little terraced house with noise and cigarette smoke and with their things. They had brought in from the car a camera and bags of presents and bottles of wine and flowers and a portable mini-disk player and a heap of leather luggage, even though they were only staying the one night; also a laptop on which David had already tried to access his e-mail. (He worked as a lighting technician, designing systems for stage shows and clubs: this seemed to necessitate frequent contacts with his associates and long sessions on the mobile.) They talked more loudly and constantly and laughed more than Clare was used to.
Clare was taken aback at how profoundly she coveted Helly's beautiful clothes. She liked to think she was fairly indifferent to material possessions. Under Bram's influence she had given away lots of her CDs, deciding she had outgrown them. They had a house full of books but no television, and Clare made her own bread and ground her own spices and salted lemons to put in salads and chicken dishes. She bought most of what she wore in charity shops: not grudgingly but pointedly, because it was more original to put together your own bits and pieces. But when she saw Helly's long lilac-coloured dress and her green velvet jacket sewn with mirrors and her toenails painted green…

Customer Reviews

Fault lines in family relationships are revealed by fate.
As an introduction to 'Accidents in the Home' we are provided with a helpful diagram illustrating the structure of the complicated family that is featured in the novel. When reading it, from time to time I referred back to this family tree, in order to make sure I understood the position of the main characters featured in each chapter. This was particularly helpful because of the way in which the novel is constructed - each of the chapters being almost a short story, some of which did not at first seem to be part of the continuity of the novel. Only towards the end of the book did it become clear how well the author had knitted them together to construct the whole. Each chapter, while featuring key incidents and different family members, contributed to the reader's understanding of the main protagonists. As in the best modern short stories, there were what seemed to be almost gratuitous additional observations, both to entertain the reader, and to enhance awareness of the context. The style is deceptively simple. The presentation suggests the influence of those earlier authors that the heroine is studying. Happily the author sufficiently distances herself from her characters that any excess of sympathy for them is avoided. I hope that if I suggest that 'sensitivity' is avoided this will be read as a compliment.
The men in the novel get rather a bad press. They seem to have a part to play, the possibly reluctant seducer whose influence remains but whose presence is dispensed with, the dull and worthy husband, the selfish old patriarch, and Graham Menges, the potter who almost by accident collects wives. The women may be more fully drawn, but they too seem to have little control over their destinies. One gravitates to various men; another seduces her friend's husband. The characters seem to have only limited ambition to take charge of their own circumstances. But Ms. Hadley seems fatalistically inclined, as the novel's title suggests, and will not permit any of her creations to act out of character.
The book is well worth reading. I felt as distanced from its milieu as I do from many Victorian novels, and rather relieved that this was the case. I am sure that any younger, female, reader would discover much to enjoy, and not a little to find disturbing, in this rewarding first novel.

Purposeless
Sorry, but I really couldn't understand the purpose of this story! All the way through the book I felt as if nothing significant was really happening and I felt completely unmoved by the whole thing after I had finished the last page. I understood the idea of two friends at opposite ends of the scale each envying the other's lifestyle, but nothing really came of it here. None of the characters were really very interesting and I'm glad the author included a family tree because I had to refer to it quite often after losing track of 'who was who' throughout the narrative. Also, what did happen to Euen in the end?

Why is there all this hype about her?
Having read the quotes from what I class as the 'good' newspapers, I thought I would be on to a winner with this book. How wrong could I be! The characters are totally unbelievable, and time jumps forward, with no explanation as to what has happened to the characters in the meantime. The sub-plot concerning other members of the family is boring and unecessary - I would have prefered to stick to the main plot and learn more about them. There is no character motivation - I found Claire's reasons to have an affair very wishy washy, and just plain annoying! I don't think there is any depth to the writing - I found it clunky and awkward.