If, at the outset, Tessa Hadley’s characters in her new collection After the Funeral and Other Stories seem — despite their many muted traumas — to be doing more or less okay, each story ultimately forces at least one person to face up to a truth that can range from the deeply uncomfortable to the devastating.
The precipitating incidents for these revelations include the funeral of a philandering airline pilot, a hippie wedding, a stepmother’s first meeting with her inept and unloved stepdaughter, a long-ago car wreck in France, and a COVID-era encounter between two women caring for their elderly charges.
One of the most surprising disclosures comes in “Dido’s Lament,” a story about Toby and Lynette, a former husband and wife who have not seen one another in years, and who literally bump into each other in the London Underground. Toby is now married with children and successful in his work. Lynette, by contrast, is an office temp still trying, unsuccessfully, to make it as an actor. She is currently “guesting in a student production of Dido and Aeneas, where Aeneas was got up as the captain of an American football team and Dido was a cheerleader” — a classic bit of Hadleyan invention, which is all the more comic for the clause that concludes the sentence: “it worked surprisingly well.”