The Party by Tessa Hadley review – a daringly old-fashioned novella

Tessa Hadley's novella has an alluring opening line: "The party was in full swing." Evelyn is following her glamorous older sister Moira to an ostentatiously unglamorous gathering in a docklands pub in postwar Bristol, where there's "sawdust on the stone-flagged floor" and smoke-stained plaster walls "crowded with advertising for brands of beer and rum and tobacco which hadn't existed for decades". Hadley, usually a writer of bourgeois households, strong on gardens and antique furniture, has a good time with dereliction, adding memorably to the literature of urination when the sisters can't find a loo. Evelyn has just started a BA in French and is working with sweet self-consciousness on her transformation into adulthood, hyper-aware of her clothes and manners and vocabulary in the way of a young adult changing class. Moira, studying fashion design at art school, seems – at least to Evelyn – more confident, more experienced, less interested in changing status.

Evelyn meets people she knows at the party, her sister's colourful friends and a smart and kind fellow student, Donald, whose niceness makes him unattractive to her but not to the reader. She asks him to buy her a drink to alleviate her disappointment with the evening: "I'm not talking to anybody," she says to him, "or at least not anybody I actually like." When he obliges, she abandons him: "she submerged herself effectively in the flamboyant, quarrelsome, ecstatic, flirting mass, drifting between different groups as if she were always on her way somewhere else". Poor Donald. This is not a world in which a woman can buy her own drink.

The story remains closely focused on two women over one weekend, but the outside world seeps in. Moira is upset, if not quite as much as she should be, by the death of a boyfriend shot in Malaya ("it was called an emergency, their father said, because if they called it a war then the plantation owners wouldn't be covered by their insurance"). The city's bombsites have hardly grown over, and there's a clear generational divide between those who fought and those too young to remember clearly. The next day, we meet the rest of the family: military Dad, whose affair with another woman goes unmentioned; Mam, who has "let herself go", in Moira's view the cause of Dad's affair; 12-year-old Ned, in trouble at school for truancy and experiments with explosives. Though the book is short and Hadley's touch delicate as ever, the family is vivid and distinctive, happy and unhappy in its own way. There's no sense of imminent disaster or comeuppance, but the domestic detail of postwar lower-middle-class life is oppressive: a knitting needle oiled by pushing through unwashed hair, "gravy browning from a crusted, ancient bottle", a dresser drawer "jumbled ... with her girdles and stockings and brassieres and spectacles and used ration books, nightdresses and knitted bed-jackets". The sisters are both comfortably at home and desperate to leave.

On Sunday night Moira takes Evelyn to a different kind of party, an ad hoc gathering in a very grand house that has passed into the possession of siblings whose cousins, "such dull good boys", died in the war. There's a different kind of dereliction here, "one empty bedroom after another ... ghostly furniture draped in white sheets, massive armoires and tallboys, unglinting cheval glasses, glass cases of stuffed birds, wall mounted trophy oars", a deep sense of belatedness. The group drink and play Truth or Dare, making Moira climb around the drawing room on the antique furniture without touching the floor, sending one of the boys to put on the dead aunt's clothes, challenging another girl to strip naked, and then it's too late and everyone's too drunk to go home.

In some ways this is daringly old-fashioned writing, its forms as retrospective as the bombed city and prewar furniture. There's an omniscient narrator, no trendy close-third here, and, as the quotations suggest, no coyness about adjectives. This novella isn't a parable or a political fiction, as many recent short novels have been. It's a pen portrait of a particular family in a particular time and place, quick and bright despite – or maybe, oddly, because of – the magnificently Victorian tendencies of the prose.