Tough Titty
Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms
Granta, 208pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781783783267
reviewed by Becky Zhang
Growing up, Bridget Grant, the narrator of My Phantoms, couldn’t wait to leave her clan — her indifferent older sister; cruel, conceited father; and eager but essentially performative mother—so she left Liverpool as soon as she finished school. Now a fortysomething academic living in London with her partner John, she hasn’t spoken to her father in years. She even skipped his funeral. She keeps visits to her mother pegged at once per year, on her mother’s birthday, while her sister Michelle is simply off the calendar. ‘I loved being in our flat,’ thinks Bridget, returning home from meeting her mum and with John out of town, ‘I loved closing the door behind me.’
Where Bridget’s solitude is not possible, author Gwendoline Riley composes convincingly fraught exchanges; the novel, her sixth, rides on the cadences of each utterance and full stop, on the pauses, one-worders and refrains that comprise communication among the Grant family. Between Lee and Hen, Bridget’s iconoclastic parents who divorced before she can remember, each word is either emphatic or exclamatory, simplistic and exhibitionist like that of an immature child. In the narrator’s memory, the two are as insufferable as they are pitiable, resulting in most of their conversations having only one willing participant. Throughout their childhoods, their bookish daughters each opted for silence.
My Phantoms oscillates between Bridget’s family-laden past and her more removed life in London, each reeking of a strained — or failed — relation with her mother. Both the book and Bridget, as she parses memories of her mother between their annual meals and sporadic text messages of the present, take up Hen as their narrative subject, crafting a study in selfishness, care and ideas of redemption.
Hen’s fickle, obstinate nature, in particular, is the object of Bridget’s scrutiny which, bearing both interest and aversion, seeps from the background of Bridget’s life into the fore as the two get older and Hen grows frailer. Raised in Venezuela for a few pleasant years before being brought back to her parents’ native England, Hen struggled to rebuild community or find companionship in the years following, abandoning shaky teaching pursuits for a dreary job in IT, divorcing twice — each husband as menacing as the last — and receding into her own static, twitching life in a modest Manchester flat. With an urge nonetheless to be fêted by others, the dogged Hen demands an audience, to the minor avail of her daughters and one equally outcast friend. Hen will not relinquish her pride, and she grabs onto her own brashly assembled ‘opinions’ of disgust or adoration or conviction with the unyielding instincts of an animal.
Bridget portrays her mother’s character with a shrewd and remarkably dispassionate sensitivity. Here is little to properly engage with; for Hen’s behavior, ‘[w]hat seemed to be required was a reaction rather than a response.’ ‘There was some other figure she’d conceived and was playing to. [. . .] Somebody beyond our life,’ observes Bridget.
In one of the book’s most vividly constructed sentences, she describes her mother awaiting her new (male) friend’s arrival at dinner:
Just as Hen’s attempts to keep a friendship with Dave fell flat, so did her trifles to appease the turbulent Lee when he used to pick up his daughters on the weekend. Bridget notes,
On the whole,
Bridget is attentive to her mother’s mental state in a manner almost demonstrative of her love—but her relationship with Hen never quite reaches that point.
Responding to Hen’s small performances with feigned encouragement, Bridget plays her part of perfunctory daughter, while privately she is also Hen’s studious witness. Each conversation with her mother stands on the precipice of disaster, with Bridget wielding both indifference and a reflexive awareness of her own cruelty. She has little intention to meaningfully support her mother (how would she?). Despite her vague knowledge that Hen suffered abuse at the hands of her two ex-husbands, Bridget hesitates to let this colour her vision of Hen with excess compassion. (She once hesitates to allow her mother into her apartment to use the bathroom.) In her wilful, exacting bewilderment, Bridget confesses, ‘I never learned anything more about the “things he made me do”. What restraint I’d shown in not pursuing that. What sly restraint.’
Beyond Hen’s diurnal suffering, Bridget occasionally paints her mother in lovely strokes. Work is miserable and Hen hardly has visitors at home, so her most reliable and joyful relationships are with her television and radio, through which she listens to poet Roger McGough (‘Swoon.’) and sings ‘Wuthering Heights’ with Kate Bush. Hen likes to dance, if only to herself and her daughters in the kitchen, in what Bridget describes as ‘a sort of flapping dance,’ a sampling of solace for her tepid life.
Yet the reader can hardly blame Bridget for her outward lack of care. Though she has found some relief from her childhood in her work and in her partner, Bridget’s own prosaic life — of watered-down routine and stern detachment — feels scarcely superior to Hen’s. Her scrutiny of Hen, moreover, seems to gesture towards her own guilt about the matter. Everyone is a victim in My Phantoms; there is a helplessness (and self-destructiveness) to all, with each member of the Grant family subject to their own unhappiness and self-deception, ever silent about their own pain and illusory expectations. Bridget clutches her own solitude in hopes of stifling all that once teemed, a reflex against life’s latent and lasting traumas. The urge to withdraw from such wounds and to shed their apparent perpetrators is a familiar, if not easy, one: Bridget is loosely aware that she might be discarding something more valuable in abandoning her mother, in leaving her ever unsolved.
‘It’s just tough titty, isn’t it?’ Hen used to tell her daughters, one of her many proud, and sometimes incongruous, mottos. Where Hen isn’t despondent (‘You don’t just snap your fingers and move you know’), she is flippantly bullish (sneering, ‘Move on move on move on’), heedless of her daughters as they later become of her. Still Bridget wishes, has convinced herself, that her mother might one day be ‘finally happy’, before her life finds its feeble end. Toward the close of the novel, on a whiteboard over Hen’s hospital bed and under the heading ‘What matters to me,’ someone (Michelle, Bridget cursorily surmises) has aptly written ‘dignity’.
Though she lingers over Bridget’s life, the ill and ageing Hen hardly puts up a real haunt in the end. What is a life, and what is a mother? asks Riley’s book. The response is helplessly quiet and, like Hen’s own saying, never sentimental.
Where Bridget’s solitude is not possible, author Gwendoline Riley composes convincingly fraught exchanges; the novel, her sixth, rides on the cadences of each utterance and full stop, on the pauses, one-worders and refrains that comprise communication among the Grant family. Between Lee and Hen, Bridget’s iconoclastic parents who divorced before she can remember, each word is either emphatic or exclamatory, simplistic and exhibitionist like that of an immature child. In the narrator’s memory, the two are as insufferable as they are pitiable, resulting in most of their conversations having only one willing participant. Throughout their childhoods, their bookish daughters each opted for silence.
My Phantoms oscillates between Bridget’s family-laden past and her more removed life in London, each reeking of a strained — or failed — relation with her mother. Both the book and Bridget, as she parses memories of her mother between their annual meals and sporadic text messages of the present, take up Hen as their narrative subject, crafting a study in selfishness, care and ideas of redemption.
Hen’s fickle, obstinate nature, in particular, is the object of Bridget’s scrutiny which, bearing both interest and aversion, seeps from the background of Bridget’s life into the fore as the two get older and Hen grows frailer. Raised in Venezuela for a few pleasant years before being brought back to her parents’ native England, Hen struggled to rebuild community or find companionship in the years following, abandoning shaky teaching pursuits for a dreary job in IT, divorcing twice — each husband as menacing as the last — and receding into her own static, twitching life in a modest Manchester flat. With an urge nonetheless to be fêted by others, the dogged Hen demands an audience, to the minor avail of her daughters and one equally outcast friend. Hen will not relinquish her pride, and she grabs onto her own brashly assembled ‘opinions’ of disgust or adoration or conviction with the unyielding instincts of an animal.
Bridget portrays her mother’s character with a shrewd and remarkably dispassionate sensitivity. Here is little to properly engage with; for Hen’s behavior, ‘[w]hat seemed to be required was a reaction rather than a response.’ ‘There was some other figure she’d conceived and was playing to. [. . .] Somebody beyond our life,’ observes Bridget.
In one of the book’s most vividly constructed sentences, she describes her mother awaiting her new (male) friend’s arrival at dinner:
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.
Just as Hen’s attempts to keep a friendship with Dave fell flat, so did her trifles to appease the turbulent Lee when he used to pick up his daughters on the weekend. Bridget notes,
[Hen’s] mental sleight was more akin to the way Michelle and I, after our swimming lessons, used to hit the buttons on the arcade games in the snack bar: we hadn’t put any money in, but nonetheless persuaded ourselves that we were affecting the progress of the yellow lights, which flashed in steps, then slowly cascaded.
On the whole,
[Hen] was mulish, when she wasn’t completely biddable, and each mode always at precisely the wrong time. Like a mime’s recalcitrant prop: the door that wouldn’t give until it did and sent you sprawling.
Bridget is attentive to her mother’s mental state in a manner almost demonstrative of her love—but her relationship with Hen never quite reaches that point.
Responding to Hen’s small performances with feigned encouragement, Bridget plays her part of perfunctory daughter, while privately she is also Hen’s studious witness. Each conversation with her mother stands on the precipice of disaster, with Bridget wielding both indifference and a reflexive awareness of her own cruelty. She has little intention to meaningfully support her mother (how would she?). Despite her vague knowledge that Hen suffered abuse at the hands of her two ex-husbands, Bridget hesitates to let this colour her vision of Hen with excess compassion. (She once hesitates to allow her mother into her apartment to use the bathroom.) In her wilful, exacting bewilderment, Bridget confesses, ‘I never learned anything more about the “things he made me do”. What restraint I’d shown in not pursuing that. What sly restraint.’
Beyond Hen’s diurnal suffering, Bridget occasionally paints her mother in lovely strokes. Work is miserable and Hen hardly has visitors at home, so her most reliable and joyful relationships are with her television and radio, through which she listens to poet Roger McGough (‘Swoon.’) and sings ‘Wuthering Heights’ with Kate Bush. Hen likes to dance, if only to herself and her daughters in the kitchen, in what Bridget describes as ‘a sort of flapping dance,’ a sampling of solace for her tepid life.
Yet the reader can hardly blame Bridget for her outward lack of care. Though she has found some relief from her childhood in her work and in her partner, Bridget’s own prosaic life — of watered-down routine and stern detachment — feels scarcely superior to Hen’s. Her scrutiny of Hen, moreover, seems to gesture towards her own guilt about the matter. Everyone is a victim in My Phantoms; there is a helplessness (and self-destructiveness) to all, with each member of the Grant family subject to their own unhappiness and self-deception, ever silent about their own pain and illusory expectations. Bridget clutches her own solitude in hopes of stifling all that once teemed, a reflex against life’s latent and lasting traumas. The urge to withdraw from such wounds and to shed their apparent perpetrators is a familiar, if not easy, one: Bridget is loosely aware that she might be discarding something more valuable in abandoning her mother, in leaving her ever unsolved.
‘It’s just tough titty, isn’t it?’ Hen used to tell her daughters, one of her many proud, and sometimes incongruous, mottos. Where Hen isn’t despondent (‘You don’t just snap your fingers and move you know’), she is flippantly bullish (sneering, ‘Move on move on move on’), heedless of her daughters as they later become of her. Still Bridget wishes, has convinced herself, that her mother might one day be ‘finally happy’, before her life finds its feeble end. Toward the close of the novel, on a whiteboard over Hen’s hospital bed and under the heading ‘What matters to me,’ someone (Michelle, Bridget cursorily surmises) has aptly written ‘dignity’.
Though she lingers over Bridget’s life, the ill and ageing Hen hardly puts up a real haunt in the end. What is a life, and what is a mother? asks Riley’s book. The response is helplessly quiet and, like Hen’s own saying, never sentimental.