Everything Will Be All Right Tessa Hadley Jonathan Cape, 422pp, £15.99 ISBN 0224071742

Tessa Hadley has written just two novels and a handful of short stories. Yet already she possesses a distinctive voice. It is difficult to imagine a Hadley character appearing in a work by any other writer, just as it is hard to imagine a Hadley sentence being written by anyone else.

The world she writes about is that of the provincial intelligentsia. Her characters, most of whom are women, tend to be either academics or artists. Very often, they have subscribed to some vaguely alternative creed or lifestyle: they are probably vegetarians, wear ethnic clothing, hold radical opinions. Frequently, they feel uncomfortable in their bodies and uncertain of their place in the world.

But the trait that Hadley's characters are most likely to display is a sense of being inferior to some more glamorous other. Her work invariably involves the appearance of a character, male or female, whose seductive appeal the protagonist is unable to resist (although, as in many Henry James novels, the reader neither knows whether the seduction will be success- ful nor what the consequences will be if it is).

Clare, the main character in Hadley's excellent first novel, Accidents in the Home (2002), is typical. A mother of three who has embraced a dull life in the country with her worthy husband, she feels hopelessly unsettled when her attractive childhood friend, Helly, and her boyfriend come to stay. Clare obsesses enviously on her friend's beauty ("Helly was grievously good to look at") and registers the "unaccustomed aura of sexual tension" that the visitors bring into the house. By contrast, we discover that Clare "had always suspected and concealed a secret abjectness in herself, some treachery of neediness toward the other sex". Unsurprisingly, the weekend has some disastrous consequences.

Accidents in the Home is a portrait of an extended family. While the novel ranges across a large cast of characters, its focus remains limited. Each chapter is a portrait of either a short period or a single episode. In Everything Will Be All Right, Hadley abandons such miniaturism and instead takes in nearly half a century, describing the lives of four generations of women from one family.

Since family life tends towards repetition, writers of sagas face an additional difficulty in making their stories come alive. In Everything Will Be All Right, Hadley exacerbates this problem by making the various generations virtually indistinguishable from each other. Her characters all face the same predictable issues: rebellion, identity and sexual awakening; how to combine domesticity with the life of the mind. While the author ably demonstrates that such patterns recur over successive generations, this does not make for an engaging novel.

Hadley barely gets a chance to display her powers of observation. Everything happens too briskly. Characters are introduced and then disappear. Nothing seems to relate to anything else. The novel only really gets going near the end, when Hadley attempts something different in describing what happens when Pearl, a thoroughly stroppy teenager, goes to live with her formidably academic father. At this point, the story becomes genuinely exciting. But some readers may not make it this far.

William Skidelsky is deputy arts and books editor

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