Gwendoline Riley’s novels “My Phantoms” and “First Love” consider the sway and scourge of family ties.
MY PHANTOMS, by Gwendoline Riley
FIRST LOVE, by Gwendoline Riley
Toward the end of “My Phantoms,” Gwendoline Riley’s seventh book — and her richest and most devastating novel so far — comes an image that catches in the mind. Bridget, the middle-aged narrator, who’s sitting in her London flat while her psychoanalyst boyfriend prepares a meal, observes her mother, Hen, watching for the arrival of a dinner guest: “Like a plant straining towards the light, as close to the glass as a person could get, and with her head turned up as far as her position would allow her to look up, my mother stood at our living room window, waiting for Dave.”
There’s nothing showy about this sentence, and readers need not pause to appreciate the ingenuity whereby it encompasses in 45 words the entire trajectory of Hen’s disappointing life, and of the book’s five-act drama. You feel it all — in that repeated up, the continual frustration and claustrophobia of the plant contorting itself to reach illusive warmth and meeting only a cold pane, so that you know this breathless holding back of the subject, this hopeful accumulation of clauses, must end in some embarrassing anticlimax. Dave turns out to be married, and in any case is nothing special, just the latest object on whom Hen has projected her fantasy of rescue from the stunted existence she’s been gamely suffering through for decades. (Hen’s cringing desperation, which often dooms her interactions, will likewise come through at dinner, when she will keep interrupting, “as if she were trying to jump onto a moving carousel.”)
That, at least, is what the daughter sees. Two pages on, Hen is still standing there in all her rigid, plaintive eagerness, and the pitying revulsion she inspires in Bridget — who’s only invited her home and introduced her to her boyfriend on sufferance — breaks the narrator’s syntax into fragments that feel uttered through gritted teeth: “Strange little silhouette. Awful animal attention.” Riley’s sense for rhythm includes a facility with dialogue that leavens the existential bleakness of the predicaments she describes. She can conjure a character unmistakably within a few syllables, even when, as in Hen’s case, her speech is littered with received ideas and phrases: “Life’s not fair, is it?” or “And yes, we just spent the whole night chatting, then. Just, you know, like a house on fire.” Or, when asked how she came to be married, briefly, to Bridget’s father, a sneering bully with his own set of knowing catchphrases in place of thought or conversation: “It was just what you did. … That was just how it was, Bridge.”
As the title of the book suggests, the narrator, like that of Riley’s previous novel, “First Love,” is tracing the contours of her parents’ histories partly to understand her own — though here the daughter tucks most of her current life away from the reader, just as she shields it from Hen. The book is structured by their rare, painfully awkward meetings; dealing with Hen reminds Bridget of her childhood habit of pushing the buttons on an arcade game she hasn’t paid to play, pretending its automated lights are flashing in response to her. It’s no small accomplishment to wring so much feeling and suspense from an examination of stasis.
Riley — whose early novels were light on plot and heavy on hard-drinking, acerbic young narrator-protagonists from the north of England who entangle themselves with men in bands — has occasionally been misread through a lens of trendy melancholia. But her work, especially since the breakthrough of “First Love,” more closely resembles the sturdy yet delicate realism of the late 19th century — Chekhov, Stendhal — in which mundane objects, landscapes and exchanges are imbued with rich layers of social and psychological meaning that shift as they are turned under the light. Like Mary Gaitskill, whose contemporary subject matter has sometimes served as a distraction, Riley is among other things a moralist.
The narrator of “First Love,” Neve, both seeks refuge from her childhood experiences and re-enacts them: Memories of her parents haunt a closely observed account of her marriage to Edwyn, a much older, more established man. Edwyn gives her money and a room to write, but he viciously shames her for her impoverished background and resents her youth, health and success as an artist. She longs for comfort and freedom but finds them incompatible. “You’re like a baby, really, aren’t you?” he says. “You won’t be happy until we’re both just crawling around this place.” Their relationship is a trap and yet their tenderness toward each other and their attempts to slip the bonds of their own ingrained behaviors are often sincere. There is a keenly affecting moment when Neve lets Edwyn reminisce about his own youth living in the spare room of some more fortunate friends — at a disadvantage, just as she is now, in his house. They recognize each other, caught in their repetitions.
“My Phantoms” goes a step further, revealing the narrator mainly through her attitude toward and treatment of her mother. Only in oblique flashes does the reader perceive Bridget’s inclination to recreate what she so chillingly observes about Hen. Noting her mother’s fearful inability to connect with anyone, her endless reliance on the same gambits, her longing for some other kind of engagement that she resolutely keeps at bay, the daughter replicates that alienated rigidity, approaching Hen in a rote, false, dutiful manner. On those rare occasions when Hen tries to connect — when she starts to cry, and even makes what sounds like a significant confession or plea — Bridget deftly dodges the opportunity.
Riley’s first few novels tended to indulge, at least in sly hints and glimpses, certain fantasies of escape through romance, whether in the form of art or of heterosexual love. “You believe in the green light,” a friend tells the narrator of Riley’s second novel, “Sick Notes.” Her protagonists would sometimes flee to the United States to write, though it was clear that, unlike some British writers, Riley figured America not as a true new world of energy and possibility, but simply a place large and blank and far away enough to allow her characters a reprieve, some room to breathe and think outside the strictures of class and family and habit and anguish — in other words, of fate. “My Phantoms” and “First Love” are harsher and yet more humane; they refuse the twin reliefs of romance and cynicism. As at the end of a Chekhov play, there’s no real escape — no quick way to slip the knot, merely the ongoing work of understanding its shape, how it was made.
Lidija Haas is an editor at The Paris Review.
MY PHANTOMS | By Gwendoline Riley | 199 pp. | New York Review Books | Paper, $16.95
FIRST LOVE | By Gwendoline Riley | 169 pp. | New York Review Books | Paper, $16.95
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/books/review/gwendoline-riley-my-phantoms-first-love.html
2022-09-13 09:00:12Z
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