London Train by Tessa Hadley

The London Train is another Tessa Hadley novel about family relationships--the main characters are sandwiched between their adult children and their infirmed and then dead parents. Middle-age dilemmas sprinkled with matter-of-fact sexual infidelities are the name of the game in this novel. In the novel's first part, we follow Paul, a writer who lives in Wales and is well into his second marriage, though still picking up the pieces from his first. He is searching for, and finds, his 'missing' daughter--she is not so much misplaced as she is avoiding her parents, and it is her father, not her mother, that she chooses to share what is going on in her life that she has left school and left them. In the second, shorter part, we follow Cora, wife of a senior civil servant who has fled back to her hometown of Cardiff following the failure of her marriage, in which the same Paul played a starring role. This folding structure suggests a symmetry that the novel eschews: it is not clear, for example, how the relationship between Paul and Cora affects, if at all, Paul's story of searching for his adult daughter who has gone missing. But I would count this asymmetry among the novel's more mature virtues, which include absolute lack of predictability and scrupulous sincerity. Cora and Paul are decidedly upper middle class--in their life-styles, in their prejudices, and in their world view. The problem is that someone forgot to tell Paul's daughter to follow those rules, and she does not. The book is strongest (for my taste) in the telling of Paul's story, but the interweaving of two tales is well written and well done. The London Train is a novel of convalescence, in which its middle-aged characters are recovering from their parents' deaths, and this convalescence reveals to Cora that "to treasure up relics from every phase of her life as it passed, as if it were holy" was "a falsely consoling model of experience". Now she feels that the "present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free". She may be onto something.