Colette was trying to develop a new way of looking at life, with more lightness, as if everything that seemed so substantial, like a school, or a home, or a marriage, was in fact only disposable and breakable. It was frightening, but also a relief. Phyllis used to joke about how Anne and her husband Tom had experimented with free love before they were married, and Colette saw now how they’d have set about it earnestly, in pursuit of an ideal. Perhaps it was better to be frivolous.
It’s 1967 in a genteel suburb of London and the camera pans to the ideal nuclear family: Father had a “good war” and is a respected Arabist with the Foreign Office; Mother, at forty, is about ten years younger than her husband, an attractive, sociable housewife; older daughter, at fifteen, is respectably studious (if a bit heavy and serious); and the nine year old son is golden and mischievous. Into this scene is introduced a bomb in the form of a twenty-something radical; the unfamiliar son of old friends — a young man trying to disavow his own bourgeois upbringing who resents the social obligation of this dinner — and as he tries to unbalance his host with Marxist provocations, he is met with unexpected good humour and intellectual curiosity. Even so, as Free Love unspools, this Nicky’s presence at the Fischer table will unleash a series of disruptive events that will mirror the change and tumult happening in the world beyond this leafy ‘burb. In relatable and highly readable prose, author Tessa Hadley captures something true about the times, but to be honest, it doesn’t feel like I learned anything new. Hadley skips primarily through the POVs of four main characters — the older couple (Roger and Phyllis) and the younger pair (Nicky and the daughter Colette) — and this is done seamlessly; I really appreciated that we saw both actions and reactions across the sexes and the generations, and especially as these were more nuanced than I expected. But still, the narrative lacked the power and energy of immediacy: I can think of novels from the Sixties that better capture the times and I don’t know if, seventy-some years later, Hadley adds anything of note (beyond a nice read) with this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Slight spoilers from here.)
Her performance as a contented wife was consummately good. It frightened Nicky: what depths of experience had he stumbled into? He had taken the Fischers at their face value, as respectable and innocent. Now it appeared that he might have been the innocent himself.
When Nicholas Knight turns up at the Fischer house — an hour late and stumbling with the beers he steeled himself with at the local pub — he immediately dismisses the romantic potential of the daughter (whom he finds “lumpy and ungracious”) and recoils from the flirty touch of his host’s wife. For her part, Phyllis is chagrined to find that young Nicky is immune to her charms, “She’d taken for granted that at her core her sexual self would continue for ever, a nugget of radioactive material charged with its power, irreducible.” Unable to crack Roger’s good cheer with his radical proclamations, Nicky inevitably does turn his attention to Phyllis: “For what was more natural, faced with this unanswerable force of his rival, than to seduce the wife?” How could Nicky know that he had provoked Phyllis into doubling down on seducing him?
Phyllis eventually tracks Nicky down to his squalid London flat, and what she will discover through him is not just a sexual awakening, but a social one, too: Mixing with the writers and artists and pot-smoking hippies of Nicky’s acquaintance, Phyllis is forced to examine everything her priveleged upbringing had taught her. In a way, Phyllis feels like the main character out of the ensemble cast in Free Love, and while you can cheer for her “unshackling the chains of the patriarchy”, you also have to wince at how unclever Hadley has made her; unable to read a work of nonfiction without her mind wandering, Phyllis is forever asking the men around her to tell her what to think. Watching a news report on the Six Day War between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, Phyllis asks Roger, “Don’t the Jews deserve their own country, after what happened to them?” And despite being a thorough establishment man, Roger’s thinking is always considered and nuanced, “Of course, incontrovertibly…The trouble is, this country of theirs belonged just yesterday to someone else. One can see the thing both ways.”
When Colette is sixteen (and has slimmed herself and started wearing contacts; but not to be attractive, Mom), she starts to associate with Phyllis and Nicky’s London friends, and I did find it interesting that her attraction to “the scene” feels more authentic than Phyllis’ had: her interest is more intellectual, while Phyllis’ felt like an emotional draw, and Free Love reads, in the end, like Collette’s coming-of-age story (as though the baton of "main character" had been passed from mother to daughter along the way). At one point, Nicky comes back from the Paris student riots (working as a journalist for a left-wing newspaper, Nicky had gone to join and observe the protest), and he lectures an assembled group that one didn’t want to be “a revolutionary tourist: there were plenty of those”. But while Phyllis hung on his every word, watching nervously to see how Nicky would react to her daughter’s presence, Colette herself was sneering at his political dilettantism:
Colette wasn’t on the side of the political types anyway. She was more drawn to the ones who talked about drugs and art and music, were often stoned and not at all in earnest. They weren’t waiting for the students and factory workers to bring about a new era. As far as they were concerned it had arrived already, they were helping themselves to it wholeheartedly.
Meanwhile, Roger — who is really such a decent man — doesn’t feel like he can stand in the way of anyone’s growth and happiness, and as you learn more about his backstory, the reader really wishes that he could grab some happiness for himself as well. The plot goes to places expected and not so expected (but if one feels the need to write “and now – in this situation as fatally twisted as a Greek drama”, perhaps the plot has gone too far), but it truly didn’t reveal anything new about the time and place; certainly nothing new about the human heart. This was a pleasant and interesting read, but held up against Hadley’s previous work, it was just fine to me.
