Everything Will be All Right By Tessa Hadley, Jonathan Cape, £ 9.75

“Pearl contemplates herself. She is seventeen” is the piquant and cryptic opening of Tessa Hadley’s second novel, Everything Will be All Right. Standing naked in front of a mirror, Pearl is struggling to come to terms with her “self-hood” while contemplating the changing contours of her body. Her “contemplation” can be seen as a passionate dialogue between her body and her “self” — something that her grandmother, Joyce Stevenson, had done earlier when Pearl was born.

Pearl belongs to the fourth generation of a family in which the women have been driven by the desire to come to terms with their self-hood. And it is in the family, or more specifically conjugal life, that this struggle is carried out.

Everything Will be All Right is Hadley’s second novel. Like her debut novel, Accident in Home, this novel too is a family saga. But, unlike the first, the second straddles five generations. And in each, the protagonists try to search for that perfect balance which would keep a marriage ticking.

Pearl’s grandmother, Joyce, had married her art teacher, Ray Deare. Their marriage had a lot of promise, but it was not without some incompatibilities and trauma. Joyce’s aunt, Vera, with whom Joyce had come to stay after her father’s death, was so preoccupied with “the life of the mind” that she fell out with her philandering husband, Dick. Zoe, Joyce’s daughter, separated from her husband too, when she felt that they were not getting on well any longer. Now, it was the turn of Zoe’s daughter, Pearl, to decide how (if at all) she must gear herself to face up to the challenges posed by marriage. Her numerous pre-marital affairs only serve to make the choice more difficult.

In this book, Hadley focuses on three paradigms which control and influence the women’s perception of their identities — the body, the family and their intellectual pursuits.

Hadlee writes a densely textured yet pliant prose. Her narrative is replete with refreshing glimpses of the English countryside. There are some risible episodes too. For instance, the incident where a drunken Joyce and Ray unwillingly share a bed, much before they actually fall in love with each other will not fail to raise a laugh.