Gwendoline Riley’s New Novel Surveys the Wreckage of Middle Age
The danger of describing other people, of applying adjectives to human beings, is that words stick and flatten. The moment I say that my mother is X, I destroy every aspect of her that X fails to contain. As each word of a sentence unfurls and you home in on your point, you risk losing hold of a person’s layers, their texture and shape. An insect stuck to a board: the metaphor’s overused, but it holds. A novelist’s task is to get the insect pinned but keep it quivering. Most writers give up. Their books have moments that flutter and spurt, images or scenes brought to vivid life, but then readers want heroes and plot, characters they like—meaning characters who are softer, less fearful simulacra of themselves. There’s an appalling conception of fiction as an escape, when, in fact, its job is to make us more attuned to life’s truths rather than blunted, far away.
Gwendoline Riley, who’s published eight books in the U.K. and is now out with “The Palm House,” in the U.S., seems instinctually able to keep the insect quivering. Her novels linger hardly at all on exposition and plot, and open mid-conversation, or in what seems like mid-thought. They sometimes lose hold of time but bound forward with a vibrating force. Scenes are tightly contained, dialogue hurled back and forth. The effect is that of a metal detector held close to the ground, finding the spaces that complicate and contradict whatever assumptions we might feel compelled to make about others.
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Like many of Riley’s earlier books, “The Palm House” is narrated in the first person, by a woman—this time, her name is Laura—who grew up lower middle class, with a selfish, bumbling mom and a cruel, ignorant dad. The settings and details (sometimes there’s a sibling; the parents may be either alive or dead) aren’t always the same, but the same basic structure recurs across her fiction. Laura’s a writer. She has left the town where she was raised and made a life in London, but she’s still stuck, unable to stop circling the people and places she comes from. Up to this point, “The Palm House” resembles Riley’s two most recent novels, “First Love” and “My Phantoms.” From here, though, the novel diverges. The narrative focusses less tightly on the “I” than in her earlier books, and—these departures feel linked—the “I” has reached middle age.
Speaking of middle age: the book is wreckage from the start. It’s 2017. Laura and a friend, Putnam, sit and drink at a bar on the Thames. A hurricane offshore whips up ash and sand from wildfires in Spain. Putnam has just quit his job as an editor at a magazine called Sequence. He and Laura have been friends for years, allied by what each of them wanted most to become, and are now joined together less by shared hopes than by the disappointments and frustrations that having become entails. As with so many magazines, Sequence’s board has no sense of what the magazine is, and when its editor-in-chief dies he’s replaced by a cad—he insists on being called Shove—whom everyone, but especially Putnam, hates. Putnam is forty-nine, and has been at Sequence more than half his life. His father has just died. He is unfailingly committed to the fact of his pain. Laura, long-suffering friend, tries again and again to take him out, cheer him up; she helps clean out his father’s house and suggests other jobs. But Putnam is dogged, digging his heels in:
Like Emma Bovary, who yearns to be “the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague ‘she’ of all the books,” Putnam keeps reaching for impossible things, not least a sense of freedom from the drudgery of real life. He’s too blustery and finally self-protective—he doesn’t kill himself—to be Emma, but, at the end of the novel’s first section, he tells Laura that when he broke up with Katherine, a member of the Sequence team and apparently the only serious girlfriend of his life, he took a train to the Sussex coast. “ ‘I kept walking and I kept shouting,’ he said. The word he shouted, over and over again, was, ‘Free.’ ”
Riley’s previous novel, “My Phantoms,” opens, as “The Palm House” does, in the middle of a conversation. The narrator’s grandmother is talking about her late husband, who served during the Second World War:
That repeated “nothing” is surely a deliberate echo of the “ ‘Nothing?’ ‘Nothing.’ ” in “King Lear,” when Lear beseeches each of his three daughters to declare the strength of their love for him, and his youngest, Cordelia, replies that she is unable to speak what is not true. The central deadlock of the play—a daughter unwilling to pander to a parental figure’s pride, a father unwilling to suffer being wounded in that way—recurs throughout Riley’s books, which are haunted by stubborn, Lear-like male egos and hard-edged women whose honesty is bracing yet often ineffectual in the face of life. “The Palm House,” in focussing its attention on Putnam, seems to ask—like so many podcasts and op-eds over the past several years—what is owed, really, to men? Yes, there’s wreckage all around, but what’s new about that?
Once Putnam has been established, the book’s relationship to both character and time shifts. The narration runs through a klatch of men Laura’s known, all of whom waver between absurd and pathetic but who are still able to harm. The worst is Chris Patrick, a comedian popular “with a certain kind of girl,” to whom Laura sent adoring tape recordings when she was young. (“It seemed awful to me that he was lonely, as he often said. ‘So lonely’ was his phrase. What a world, I thought. What could it mean that someone like that could be lonely?”) She starts going to his comedy shows, where she makes a friend, Anna. He invites them back to his hotel. He’s twenty-nine; they’re both in their teens. “Giz a squeeze,” he says. Laura describes the fantasies she and Anna have about Chris Patrick, “about a future where he had been brought low somehow and we went and found him and rescued him. No one recognized or remembered him except for us. . . . We were in our thirties, elegant and fulfilled; he was fifty, and, frankly, a wreck.” They’re smarter than him, and it’s useless in the face of age, gender, money, power. But then, even as teens, the girls sense that time will alter how that power feels and looks.
We get only a few pages about Laura’s father, by way of her uncle, Owen, who calls to report her father’s death. As in Riley’s previous two books, the novel orbits around the mother—the barnacle or spur the narrator can’t shake. But we learn enough. Owen is a bad-dad-apologist. He and his wife helped to take care of Laura’s dad late in his life. And then this: “Owen had often been there during those long half-term holidays I’d had to spend with my father. He’d seen what went on. Owen, I remember, had dutifully come and sniffed my armpit while my father had held my arm up and said, ‘It’s not just me, is it, that’s a pretty ripe smell?’ ” Laura’s life, in other words, has always been part wreck.
The book’s movements through time don’t always declare themselves. We get a page break, a new section or chapter, and then we’re in a different period, sometimes marked and sometimes not. In the place of rising action or climax, what pressure exists in the book arises from a sort of roiling helplessness. Laura sees the world so clearly: her mother’s inanities, the failures of the men she knows, the chasm between what she wishes life were and what she knows it is. But what does seeing clearly get her? Her mom is still her mom. Her body still wants sex. The rumbling aliveness of the novel comes, in part, from the friction of these facts: what does it mean, really, to know better? No matter how many years we spend reading, thinking, watching films, somehow, insanely, we still have to live. As the story’s scenes accrue, this collision creates a sense, if not of agency or of power (which is perhaps the stuff of heroes), at least of stamina, the recognition that more and more life, more and more looking at it, can generate its own sort of strength.
Just once, Laura tries to explain her mother to Putnam. He immediately pins her down: “Northern . . . this annihilating flippancy . . . everything I’ve fought against for my whole life.” Laura’s annoyed enough never to try again, and also has to admit that most of what he says is true. Her mother is flip. She’ll do most anything for “a laff,” as Putnam says. And yet, in the scene immediately preceding this one, Laura has met up with her mother and her erstwhile boyfriend. Her mother’s been laid off and says—flippantly—that she might spend the time revisiting all the places she’s lived, “just as a project.” Laura suggests that it “could tell a story . . . a bit of social history. Where life has taken you.” The conversation drifts. The subject is dropped.
Only later do you realize that “The Palm House” moves past and into the houses and flats that Laura’s inhabited. Her mother’s idea was good. The vibrating center of all Riley’s books lies in moments like this. Laura’s mom is as silly as Putnam assumes. But no person is just an adjective. Putnam—with his glib dismissals, his unwillingness to consider what he might be besides the fallen hero of Sequence, to feel something beyond the agony of his father’s loss and his mother’s before that (“Putnam’s mother had died when he was twelve, but this fact was still in some way the key piece of information about him”)—fails to see this.
Riley is much too sharp a writer to pose and answer a single question in her fiction. Being inside her novels is a singular, spiky, often deeply funny experience. But, insofar as “The Palm House” casts its keen eye on men, it lingers on the ways that stories about heroes, about conquering and winning, about what men are owed and deserve, can be just as much of a trap as the stories told to women about what we are or aren’t.
I don’t believe revealing plot points spoils books, so I will say: Putnam returns to Sequence in the end, as incapable of facing any sense that his life is less than what he had hoped as he was at the beginning. But it’s Laura and the reader who have learned—the novel has shown us if we’ve not yet lived enough ourselves—the weight and import of a survival that is not always elegant, but all the more expansive and hard-won. ♦