“The Maths Tutor”
by Tessa Hadley
from the July 24, 2023 issue of The New Yorker
What a month for Tessa Hadley fans! Not only did we get her new story collection After the Funeral, but we get a new story in The New Yorker? And it’s a great one! As per usual, let’s let Hadley herself introduce the story:
In her thirties, Lorraine was unfaithful once or twice; she didn’t tell her husband. Quentin owed her, she reckoned, in that long accounting of pluses and minuses which is marriage. Owed her not only because he was unfaithful, too — although he certainly had been, she didn’t doubt it, and more than once or twice — but also because he was impossible. He was one of those impossible men, attractive but also sleazy, in a way that was more popular then, in the eighties and nineties, than it is now. He was long-limbed and superskinny, fizzing and jigging and restless with energy, his ugly sharp face alight with cleverness and mockery of everything. Nowadays he wouldn’t get away with it. Quent didn’t once, not ever, attend any of the parents’ evenings at their children’s schools, or cook a meal for the family, or use the vacuum cleaner. If he took the children out it was on some crazy, risky adventure, not to buy shoes. Usually, anyway, he was high on some illegal substance or another. When Lorraine thought of him, that was how she pictured him: deep in concentration, his long hair falling forward around his face dipped to the toke, his hand cupped around the lighter flame, his gracile long fingers stained with nicotine. Sometimes he fried up steaks with herbs and wine when they had friends round to eat, and everyone was amazed by his culinary skills; it was all so delicious. He paid a fortune once, at a time when they were so short of money, for a good suit lined in purple silk, sewn by a tailor who made suits for the Rolling Stones.
I have read this one already, and I think it’s so well done. I hope you’ll share your thoughts below!
I’ll read this later. My first impression on this introduction is, this is a character very similar to the dad in “Sins of My Father” by Lily Dunn. A memoir I have just read, The same period, the same sleazy charm, lazy uselessness, drugtaking. I think reality (Dunn) is more graphic and terrifying than fiction – Tessa Hadley is usually so restrained and leaves much to the imagination. Will be interesting to see how fiction ends the story.
I recall that I liked “The Maths Tutor” when I first read it last year, before I arrived at M & G. Visiting this page for the first time today, I see Trevor said it’s great, while Senior hadn’t read it but was very interested to do so. Yet neither they nor anyone else has commented! Yesterday, I reread the story, because I was in the middle of reading her novel _Late in the Day_ , and… I’ll get to that later.
As usual, I also read the author interview, and (as is often the case) it seemed to largely preclude the need for further discussion here. Is that maybe what happened? In the future I may hesitate to read the interview until I’ve thought about the story more. In some cases, I think the author explains too much… Maybe I’d rather not read the interviews at all!
In this case, I particularly noticed something Hadley didn’t mention. At some point in my reading life, I got hooked on being attentive to the narrator’s point of view, and to who or what the narrator is. Here, I’d argue that the third person narrator is the author, following the p.o.v. of Lorraine, narrating only what Lorraine could perceive—*until near the end of the story when the narrator departs from Lorraine’s perception to Quent’s, narrating his observations and actions of which Lorraine is presumably unaware.
Up to this point, we only know Quent as Lorraine perceives/conceives him. She could be wrong in any number of ways, for all we know. For example, “technically” speaking (is that the best word?), we don’t *know that Quent had had any extramarital affairs, only that Lorraine feels sure he did. The reader is shown too little of Quent’s experience of their marriage for us to know *why he feels as he seems to at the end of the story.
Finally, the narrator returns briefly to Lorraine’s p.o.v., so we can see her husband’s behavior through her eyes.
The narrator demonstrates the ability to move from one character’s p.o.v. to another’s, but chooses not to share with the reader much other than Lorraine’s. Clearly, the narrator is choosing to share a biased view with the reader. The interview reveals that the author shares that bias—not that we need the interview to recognize this. So the author and narrator are one and the same.
Seems to me, the author has fudged the story in this way. This might be regarded as a flaw in the narrative. Other than that, I agree with Trevor that it is “well done”. I like the writing style and substance, and the story’s unexpected twists.
Maybe the flaw could have easily been avoided. Not to reveal too much for those who haven’t read it (and I hope you will), but possible spoiler alert: we needn’t have witnessed Quent’s discovery. We could have only witnessed Lorraine being puzzled but uncertain later finding “it” in a different pocket from the one where she *thought she had left it. We could still have seen him as she did after that. No need for any change of p.o.v. Wouldn’t that have been as good an ending?
I had only ever read a few of Hadley’s stories before j picked up _Late in the Day_ , few enough not to consciously connect them all to her. I was looking at the book, not especially intending to read it, only reviewing the descriptions, when I thought: what the heck, let’s see what it’s like. I found myself drawn in…
I was largely enjoying the reading, but was sometimes annoyed. See, I’ve been mostly reading short stories, so I was impatient with what seemed like unnecessary elaborations, fluff. Admittedly, not as bad as pop fiction, what little I’ve read, but still… I found the characters convincing, and their relationships well developed… I had anticipated what the inevitable crisis point would be…
I was about halfway through the book, into section 4. Sections 1 and 3 are present time, 2 and 4 are flashbacks covering different times. I imagine that scheme will continue. Section 4 is a very different narrative style from what came before: a rather packed, condensed coverage of a period of time. I wasn’t enjoying it. Ironically, I became impatient and wanted to skip along to get back to the present time. Instead, I finally decided to quit for the time being. Maybe I was too tired to focus on that sort of writing.
That’s when I hunted up past Hadley stories in TNY, to remind myself. Reading “The Maths Tutor”, I had the “oh, yeah, now I remember” experiece at every turn. I have one of her collections somewhere… Where the hell is it? I must turn that up!
Thanks Eddie, I found this helpful and yes I agree that it may have worked better without the change of perspective. Quent/ Quint ? – the ‘bad’ servant from ‘ The Turn of the Screw’, which leaves the ambiguity about the narrator’s reliability.