Cruel to be Kind
Gwendoline Riley, The Palm House
Picador, 224pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781035021048
reviewed by Martha Sprackland
A new Gwendoline Riley novel might strike a sort of fantastic fear into the heart — may we never be so precisely perceived! Her observation of the minutiae of (awkward, solipsistic, desperate) human behaviour makes her characters painfully real, all their idiosyncrasy and damage laid bare. Characters perform banalities and clichés, struggle to hide their weaknesses whilst hopelessly revealing them, repeat their peculiar gestures and habits.
The foil to the more flamboyant of these skewerings is, in The Palm House as in other of Riley’s novels, a watchful, enigmatic first-person narrator; the good listener, the self-contained loner, the bookish and unambitious adult scraping together the wherewithal for a studio flat; the green adolescent who not so much fails to understand as simply decides not to.
‘No, indeed,’ she might reply, or ‘Yes, I can hear that,’ or ‘Oh, excellent.’ She might tease up the thread of a story: ‘But was he a Cockney?’ or ‘Was he gay?’. She might simply listen. In the iodine-yellow Saharan dust cloud hanging heavy over London, Laura finds that ‘that funny, sallow atmosphere induced a peaceful sort of quiescence.’
If the protagonist is self-contained, not given to the histrionics of other figures in the book, it is perhaps because of the years spent in the company of the attention-vacuum of the mother (not the first such mother in Riley’s cosmogony). In The Palm House as in Riley’s other novels, this learned inwardness is a necessary tactic for surviving such a mother.
Neither Laura nor her friend Putnam seem quite fit for the world. He, perhaps, is suited only for life at Sequence, the erudite and long-running critical journal where he has worked for 25 years. When a new editor (Simon ‘call me Shove’ Halfpenny) and his crap new ideas are drafted in from a sports title to threaten that ecosystem, Putnam’s self-exile follows, then Putnam’s self-pity. It’s as good a depiction of the institutionalised editorial offices of literary London as any I’ve read.
The book does not worry itself unduly about more traditional narrative structures. We move back and forth in time, from Laura’s adolescent encounters on the Wirral with dubiously charming comedian Chris Patrick, to the present day of her long friendship with Putnam, in which all sort of fragile feelings get underfoot.
This is not a happy book. The reader is clear that these will not be the last disappointments for these characters. In their skinlessness, in their ill-fitness for other, more modern iterations of the apparently dying world they inhabit, they are like the delicate and temperamental ferns the title of the novel conjures, made absolutely specialist for an environment that must, in this more hostile climate, be artificially replicated and contained. They are both absurd and tragic.
This isn’t to say that these depictions are not made with affection. We’re all strange, Riley seems to say — here are only some of the ways. And is it not a great compliment, to be on the receiving end of such fierce attention? (‘Here Putnam frowned. He picked up his glass and held it to his temple.’) Perhaps a Putnam wouldn’t mind it at all. We’re all — even perhaps the Lauras among us — voracious for this sort of information, glimpses into our own deep and formative pasts for clues as to how and why and when we became the person we appear now to be.
The Palm House is a funny book. See, part of me wants to write blackly funny; darkly funny — but in truth, it’s the humour that operates the levers of complexity, lifting or leavening the bittersweetness. It’s not that wit is light relief — more, that we are forced to see even tragedy as a source of inherent humour. The mother’s bombastic and often incomprehensible catchphrases, her ‘little apéritif’, her ‘speak-a to Charlie!’ (‘I didn’t know what that was; I haven’t heard it since.’) Poor old Putnam harrumphs his way touchily through an argument: ‘“Huh,” he said, mildly, sighingly.’
Dialogue is absurdly well-observed. Often, it employs an agreeably disorienting format in which the thread of one person’s speech is interrupted not by unwieldy dialogue tags, but simply by line breaks and fresh speech marks, the effect being that each new utterance feels unmoored from the last, conversation moving back and forth across the shared space of a long friendship like little boats on the Thames by the pub where Laura and Putnam sit.
The effect of such accurate observation, all the flinches and abortive gestures and little moues, every passing cloud of affective weather, is that when we sense an absence — and much is absent, missing or omitted — we trust that it must nevertheless be there. Riley’s novels are spare, but entirely three-dimensional, however much remains hidden beneath the surface. The book could easily be longer (at around fifty thousand words, it’s almost a novella), but that isn’t ‘the project’. The world is pared into being. I don’t mean that the prose itself is etiolated — this is not minimalism — but that the characters are lifted in relief from the bedrock of their personal history, the why of character. In this way, they are both under- and over-exposed. We might see them at once excoriated, almost flayed, and yet simultaneously permitted a respectable privacy, an empathetic acknowledgement of their complexity.
This is to say, for all of the emphasis on ‘sharpness’ or ‘cruelty’ that often characterises reviews of her novels, Riley respects her characters, in all the essential muddle and truth of them, all their dissatisfactions and fragile hopes. It’s a feat. Really, it’s this — along with the depredations of wealth inequality, the cul-de-sac of the parental relationship, and the discontents of erudition — that is the engine for Riley’s fiction, in The Palm House as in the seven novels that precede it.
The foil to the more flamboyant of these skewerings is, in The Palm House as in other of Riley’s novels, a watchful, enigmatic first-person narrator; the good listener, the self-contained loner, the bookish and unambitious adult scraping together the wherewithal for a studio flat; the green adolescent who not so much fails to understand as simply decides not to.
‘No, indeed,’ she might reply, or ‘Yes, I can hear that,’ or ‘Oh, excellent.’ She might tease up the thread of a story: ‘But was he a Cockney?’ or ‘Was he gay?’. She might simply listen. In the iodine-yellow Saharan dust cloud hanging heavy over London, Laura finds that ‘that funny, sallow atmosphere induced a peaceful sort of quiescence.’
If the protagonist is self-contained, not given to the histrionics of other figures in the book, it is perhaps because of the years spent in the company of the attention-vacuum of the mother (not the first such mother in Riley’s cosmogony). In The Palm House as in Riley’s other novels, this learned inwardness is a necessary tactic for surviving such a mother.
Neither Laura nor her friend Putnam seem quite fit for the world. He, perhaps, is suited only for life at Sequence, the erudite and long-running critical journal where he has worked for 25 years. When a new editor (Simon ‘call me Shove’ Halfpenny) and his crap new ideas are drafted in from a sports title to threaten that ecosystem, Putnam’s self-exile follows, then Putnam’s self-pity. It’s as good a depiction of the institutionalised editorial offices of literary London as any I’ve read.
One of Shove’s editorials had begun, ‘What is it about dogs?’ Another, ‘April is the cruellest month, as the poet T. S. Eliot once famously wrote.’
‘Am I reading the New Yorker?’ Vik had said.
The book does not worry itself unduly about more traditional narrative structures. We move back and forth in time, from Laura’s adolescent encounters on the Wirral with dubiously charming comedian Chris Patrick, to the present day of her long friendship with Putnam, in which all sort of fragile feelings get underfoot.
This is not a happy book. The reader is clear that these will not be the last disappointments for these characters. In their skinlessness, in their ill-fitness for other, more modern iterations of the apparently dying world they inhabit, they are like the delicate and temperamental ferns the title of the novel conjures, made absolutely specialist for an environment that must, in this more hostile climate, be artificially replicated and contained. They are both absurd and tragic.
This isn’t to say that these depictions are not made with affection. We’re all strange, Riley seems to say — here are only some of the ways. And is it not a great compliment, to be on the receiving end of such fierce attention? (‘Here Putnam frowned. He picked up his glass and held it to his temple.’) Perhaps a Putnam wouldn’t mind it at all. We’re all — even perhaps the Lauras among us — voracious for this sort of information, glimpses into our own deep and formative pasts for clues as to how and why and when we became the person we appear now to be.
The Palm House is a funny book. See, part of me wants to write blackly funny; darkly funny — but in truth, it’s the humour that operates the levers of complexity, lifting or leavening the bittersweetness. It’s not that wit is light relief — more, that we are forced to see even tragedy as a source of inherent humour. The mother’s bombastic and often incomprehensible catchphrases, her ‘little apéritif’, her ‘speak-a to Charlie!’ (‘I didn’t know what that was; I haven’t heard it since.’) Poor old Putnam harrumphs his way touchily through an argument: ‘“Huh,” he said, mildly, sighingly.’
Dialogue is absurdly well-observed. Often, it employs an agreeably disorienting format in which the thread of one person’s speech is interrupted not by unwieldy dialogue tags, but simply by line breaks and fresh speech marks, the effect being that each new utterance feels unmoored from the last, conversation moving back and forth across the shared space of a long friendship like little boats on the Thames by the pub where Laura and Putnam sit.
The effect of such accurate observation, all the flinches and abortive gestures and little moues, every passing cloud of affective weather, is that when we sense an absence — and much is absent, missing or omitted — we trust that it must nevertheless be there. Riley’s novels are spare, but entirely three-dimensional, however much remains hidden beneath the surface. The book could easily be longer (at around fifty thousand words, it’s almost a novella), but that isn’t ‘the project’. The world is pared into being. I don’t mean that the prose itself is etiolated — this is not minimalism — but that the characters are lifted in relief from the bedrock of their personal history, the why of character. In this way, they are both under- and over-exposed. We might see them at once excoriated, almost flayed, and yet simultaneously permitted a respectable privacy, an empathetic acknowledgement of their complexity.
This is to say, for all of the emphasis on ‘sharpness’ or ‘cruelty’ that often characterises reviews of her novels, Riley respects her characters, in all the essential muddle and truth of them, all their dissatisfactions and fragile hopes. It’s a feat. Really, it’s this — along with the depredations of wealth inequality, the cul-de-sac of the parental relationship, and the discontents of erudition — that is the engine for Riley’s fiction, in The Palm House as in the seven novels that precede it.