The House of Hospitalities

by Emma Tennant

Book by Tennant, Emma

Genres: Fiction

183 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Since the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-thirties, Emma Tennant has been a prolific novelist and has established herself as one of the leading British exponents of "new fiction." This does not mean that she is an imitator of either the French nouveaux romanciers or the American post-modernists, although her work reveals an indebtedness to the methods and preoccupations of some of the latter. Like them, she employs parody and rewriting, is interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriates some science-fiction conventions, and exploits the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, her work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction.

Reviews

[Grace Tierney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for my book club. I didn't choose it myself. Sometimes that's a great thing, a way to stretch my taste, find a new author to love. Sometimes it is a disappointment. This time it fell somewhere in between.

The eclectic cast of upper class English house guests and family in the grand estate teenager Jenny visits with her school friend are fun. There are drunks at the dinner table, dodgy artists, faithful retainers, and affairs everywhere, just as Jenny's aunt had warned her.

They could slide into stereotypes but the author manages to hold back from that pitfall. Instead she strays into another - political commentary layered on to of the story to the point where the plot fades to background as she shares her ideas that the rich are different from ordinary people. Well, yes, they are and English society can be very divided on class lines, but that's not news.

There is a subplot of coming of age too, but overall I thought the book lost its way in the later section and the ending seemed rushed, inconclusive, and unsatisfying, for my taste anyhow. A shame as the four teens were interesting - the rich daughter pushed into marriage, the thieving outrageous Carmen, Jenny the main protagonist, and Candida who appears as shy sidekick daughter of first generation immigrants but turns out to be a social climber.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emma Tennant is quite an accomplished writer of some renown. Her family was interesting, and this book suggests an illustration of their cosseted life.

The book didn't disappoint in its topic, and often not in its writing. But at times, I found myself slightly confused or mystified about getting from A to Z, or even B.

The young woman's weekend at the Lovescombes lush, somewhat antiquated estate, raises class, ethical, artistic, and practical questions. It is amusing and extreme.

I almost forgot: one should read Thomas Hardy's poem of the same title. It elucidates much.

The end of the novel is abrupt, and I even wonder if my copy was somehow damaged, missing final pages.

An enjoyable, if puzzling, read.

[Mary McDonnell · Rating 1 out of 5]

I abandoned this book after reading two thirds. I just lost interest.

[Anthony Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

One star means what it says on the Goodreads tin – ‘I didn’t like it’. Which is not the same as saying ‘It was rubbish’.

But it is nevertheless true that I didn’t finish it. I got fed up with the sluggish pace and the style: the first-person narrator’s given style, I’d suggest, may well have dictated the pace.

Things I didn’t like – or misapprehended. All things for other readers to take issue with, doubtless and quite rightly.

Story in brief: an impressionable teenage schoolgirl, Jenny, is invited (as second choice) to spend a holiday with a fellow pupil, Amy Lovescombe, a scion of an aristocratic family at her family seat. The narrator is that schoolgirl, writing as an older and well-educated woman, and she describes not only what she finds and what goes on at Lovegrove, but also looks at the way the politics of a girls’ school works for teenagers.

a) Story and style were redolent of ‘The Go-Between’, ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and Margaret Drabble (who, admittedly, I read when I was probably too young, and whose style and subject matter I didn’t get – I stand ready for a change of mind). The Hartley and the Waugh are novels I’ve never really got on with: I find them a bit too carefully worked, though I admire ‘Brideshead’.

b) A former colleague used to describe Graham Greene as a writer who scratched his own neuroses in public, and I felt that to be the case a bit with ‘House of Hospitalities’, even though the narrator seems to be scratching the neuroses of the dysfunctional aristocrats she is recalling rather than her own. But she might have scratched her own as the story progressed. But I didn’t feel as if I wanted to care.

c) I put the novel aside shortly after a lengthy description of the narrator’s first dinner with the family. Tennant introduces each family member carefully, but, to me, unclearly, and it was laborious to keep working out who was or had been married to whom, and who the children and parents were etc. It also didn’t help to have a character called Carmen and another called Candida: I kept getting them confused.

d) Because the novel is, in effect, a memoir, I felt the narrator was working out what she made of a significant moment in her past, but that in doing so she was doing all the thinking for us. That meant, among other things, her descriptions of the landscape, the architecture and the decorations and the furnishings of Amy’s home, Lovegrove, read something like a manual for National Trust volunteers. I found this tedious and such passages held up the story. The consequence was that I found it all too easy to lose touch with the story.
e) Much of the narrative is conducted in long paragraphs without much dialogue. I recall a colleague – not the Graham Greene sceptic – saying that, as he got older, if he flicked through a novel and judged it to have paragraphs that were regularly longer than a page and there was scant dialogue, he’d give it a miss. I am older now, and I recognize and acknowledge the sentiment.

There were a couple of narrative elements I thought I might have found interesting. One involves Amy Lovescombe’s grandmother who seems to have been something of a rebel when she was younger. The other is the character of Carmen who is something of a teenage rebel at Amy and Jenny’s school.

And I think Tennant’s detailed, careful, well-shaped sentences may well appeal to other readers.

But, for me, not a novel that gripped me enough to want to get to the end.