“Considering one’s life requires a horribly delicate determination, doesn’t it?” observes Neve, the narrator of Gwendoline Riley’s First Love (2017). That acridly painful novel was followed by My Phantoms (2021), thought by many to be her finest study of what had been—until The Palm House—her favorite subject: dysfunctional families.* More boldly than their four predecessors, First Love and My Phantoms strip the veils away from the contortions that Riley’s self-justifying storytellers must perform to gain approval for their past acts of desperate abnegation, withdrawal, and measured unkindness.
Probing the past in search of a truth that will exonerate them has always both obsessed and frustrated Riley’s anxious characters. “You wake,” Neve continues, “and your dreams disband, in a mid-brain void.” And so the search resumes. It takes time for the reader to appreciate that Riley, a consummately manipulative novelist, is stage-managing a combat between her readers’ moral judgment and the questionable behavior for which a female narrator seeks validation.
Conflicted feelings about past events first became significant in Riley’s third novel, Joshua Spassky (2007). Spassky’s lover, Natalie, remembers how as a child she had pretended (“just out of spontaneous spite”) to shrink from the slipper her divorced father raised above her as a joke after crushing a gigantic spider in her bedroom. “Well, maybe not that spontaneous,” Natalie muses, remembering how “he used to punch Mum in the face. I’d seen it. Him cracking the back of his hand against her face.”
The narrator’s need to find a satisfactory view of the past was on display again in Opposed Positions (2012). Humiliation is the weapon wielded there by a father who takes pleasure in photographing his wife perched on the toilet after he’s thoughtfully removed the lock to the bathroom door and jeers at his clever daughter, Aislinn, for her “literary degree.” Later, as a published novelist who is puzzled by the copious annotations and underlinings in her old college books, Aislinn wonders what had once been the significance of such earnest markings: “It’s hard to tell what I was getting at, only that—clearly there was something I was trying to sound out, and that was how I had to start, apparently, with that kind of calling out.”
The process of “calling out” got underway in First Love, in which cat-loving Neve is married to a demanding and much older man, Edwyn, with whom she feels somewhat gruesomely comfortable. (He calls her “little cleany puss” and “Mrs Pusskins.”) Neve ministers, nurse-like, to her crotchety husband’s arthritic hands while keeping humanity at a distance. “I love animals, their natural ways,” she informs us. Later, during a peculiarly aggressive scene in which Edwyn boasts of his innate nastiness, Neve questions her abject response:
And while he might have said that this was how he was, for me it continued to be frightening, panic-making, to hear the low, pleading sounds I’d started making, whenever he was sharp with me. This wasn’t how I spoke. (Except it was.) This wasn’t me, this crawling, cautious creature. (Except it was.) I defaulted to it very easily. And he let me. Why?
Why indeed? One possibility is that Neve is confronting the uncomfortable truth that she has started to perform her mother’s submissive role. Fighting it, she mocks her mother’s neediness—“this hot desire to join in with people who don’t want you”—while placing herself within that cruelly excluding group. She notes the “revulsion” she felt when her mother, an unwelcome visitor, teeth bared in what Neve refuses to construe as a smile, first stepped into her flat: “This was my home, and I was letting her into it. I’d never done that before. I haven’t since.” But it’s Edwyn, in the final and most intense section of First Love, who calls out the fact that Neve’s taste for older men who can intimidate her was set by a father who, like Aislinn’s in Opposed Positions, specializes in the art of humiliation.
Is Edwyn right? Neve, speaking with the cool ferocity that has become a hallmark of Riley’s style, has already offered examples of her father’s “antics.” She has expressed the hope that she is “giving credit to his range” before recalling the occasion on which he sent the adolescent Neve back upstairs to scrub an almost spotless toilet bowl before sharing his views on her imagined squalor with a visitor: “‘Women just aren’t naturally clean, are they?’ he said.”
First Love showed Riley maintaining taut control of the tone in which her narrator describes experiences and responds to them, forcing the reader to keep questioning Neve’s view of herself and others. In My Phantoms Riley went further. Bridget Grant’s father is a familiar figure, a bully who might yank her trousers down when she stands up to go to the bathroom or mock her for reading Chekhov’s plays in translation: “‘Intelligent people learn the language if they’re really interested,’ he said. ‘What you’re reading could be anything,’ he said.”
Riley allows Bridget to discover the root of her father’s noisy cruelty by slow degrees; it’s only when refusing to attend his funeral that his victimized sister explains why she herself chooses not to “do” family events. But the focus here is on Bridget’s relationship with a more richly intriguing figure: her poignant mother.
Helen Grant, more widely known as Hen, is Riley’s finest creation. Framed by Bridget’s chilly stare, she cuts a pathetic and evidently annoying figure, best kept at a distance. “I didn’t, as a rule, talk to her about anything that mattered to me,” Bridget explains. “Why upset her by talking about things she couldn’t understand or enjoy?” That simmering irritation begins to rise when the hapless Hen takes to visiting London for her annual birthday celebration. On the first occasion (to celebrate her sixtieth), Bridget turns down Hen’s invitation and stays home with her boyfriend to pet their rescue cat. Six years later, bored of going to the cozily old-fashioned “birthday” restaurant favored by Hen, Bridget takes her mother to a grim vegan café beneath a closed sandwich shop and waits to see how she will deal with “two large, colourful haystacks of grated vegetables. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Nature’s bounty.’ ‘Oh. Gosh,’ my mother said. I got a twinge then.”
With exquisite skill, Riley keeps widening the gap between Bridget and the audience, from whom she seeks sympathy for her own “mean reasonableness.” In one episode—it’s a replay of a similar maternal invasion in First Love—Bridget tries to prevent her mother from inspecting (she dramatizes it, unhumorously, as “that fearsome raid”) the flat that Bridget and her almost invisible partner (John, an analyst) have just purchased. In another artfully managed scene, Bridget, undertaking a brief spell of mother care, vaunts her cooking skills: “I chopped and fried, and stirred and simmered. I sliced open the poppadom packet.” Later during that same grudging visit, ignoring Hen’s timid protests, she sweeps her mother’s tatty but cherished possessions into garbage bags and out the door. “I’d grown up surrounded by shit,” Bridget explains, “and I always enjoyed getting rid of it.” Hen, we gather, registers distress but remains somehow “remarkably amenable.”
The silences gather weight as Hen, diagnosed with a brain tumor, becomes increasingly passive. It’s Bridget, naturally, who informs her that she is going to die. Notably incapable of demonstrative gestures throughout the novel—we hear of the cat being cuddled while Hen is granted the cooler comfort of fingertip taps—Bridget closes the final bedside encounter with an act of affection that feels closer to hate:
“Well. Bye then, Mum,” I said, again holding then squeezing her limp left hand. I put my lips to her hot head, then leant down to perform a hug. I held her loosely, around those narrow shoulders, and then squeezed a bit harder. As I stepped back, the carer set to strapping her into the sling. He passed the fabric behind her, then under her legs.
The tone of grim geniality is impeccable. Its coldness is glacial.
When informed that she was one of the eight recipients of the 2026 Windham–Campbell Prizes, Riley remarked that the $175,000 that came with the award would free her to write as she wanted. It seems an odd statement, given that The Palm House marks a large step away from her previous parent-dominated work. A step, but there’s no escaping the fact that the novel blooms into a fetid form of life only when Laura, some fifty pages into examining a current scenario, shifts back into a troubled and—to the Riley reader—not unfamiliar childscape.
In an interview earlier this year, Riley denied the novel’s striking parallels with a more recent and personal past. The novel’s scathing portrait of Simon (“Shove”) Halfpenny apparently bears no relation to Stephen “Stig” Abell’s energetic four-year editorship of the Times Literary Supplement, in which reviews by Riley frequently appear. It seems to be by pure chance that “Shove,” like Stig Abell, is privately known to his work colleagues as “Shouty Bumcrack” and that reference is made in the text both to his “loudly enthusiastic” ways at Sequence magazine and to his Abell-like practice of keeping his wheeled desk chair in perpetual motion, “as if the room were a screen and he himself a restive cursor.”
For Edmund Putnam, Laura’s slightly older friend and literary mentor, a gentler form of mockery is reserved. Putnam is the proud deputy editor at Sequence (a pride rather endearingly displayed when he hands out cards bearing his job title during a staff outing); his hostility to Shove’s attempt to popularize a respected literary magazine is shown to be justified. What Laura, shrewder than she likes to let on, seeks to prevent is impetuous action: the resignation on which Putnam is madly intent and after which, at forty-nine, a pure-minded literary editor’s chances of a comeback at some other publication appear remote.
Sand and ash swirl above the Thames, creating “the murky effects” of the novel’s opening, set on a riverside pub’s terrace: “a dark yellow sky—like iodine—and brownish clouds, mounted in flat, extravagant, painterly puffs.” Riley is offering a smart literary nod to the volcanic “summer of darkness” of 1816, when the Shelleys and Byron lived as neighbors beside Lake Geneva. Laura plays a coolly rational Mary Shelley to Putnam’s moody Byron as they share drinks, bags of crisps, and a few of the ever-nostalgic Putnam’s sackload of “good old days” reminiscences. Theirs, it would seem, is a well-established and most likely platonic relationship that is mutually beneficial.
For London-based readers—London’s literary world is notoriously cliquish—an effort is needed to dismiss background knowledge of Riley’s ten-year marriage to the TLS’s former deputy editor Alan Jenkins, the cat they shared and cherished—cats play an entirely benevolent role in Riley’s fiction—and Jenkins’s deep attachment to the poems of Eliot, notably The Wasteland and Four Quartets. (Shove causes shudders in the Sequence corridors when he runs an editorial noting that “April is the cruellest month, as the poet T.S. Eliot once famously wrote.”) Some readers may feel a frisson when Laura, gliding through the riverside offices of Sequence, watches Putnam defer to a literary grande dame: “‘That’ll be me one day,’ I said, when he came back over. ‘Yes. Well. You might try to avoid that,’ he said. ‘She’s a very brilliant writer,’ he said, ‘and a royal pain in the arse.’”
Riley is brilliant, and never more so than in the amount of slippage that she allows to appear in the unheard voice between the printed lines of dialogue. She shows us Putnam glorying in his wretchedness, carrying it about like a portable coffin, or reveling in it from a clifftop. “I used to feel,” Laura remarks, “at those times, talking to him, as if I were trying to climb a steep sand dune, while he stood on the crest: exultant in his misery.” Elsewhere Putnam wears “a face you might see on a storm-swung pub sign: eyes agleam with ancient, pagan malice.” But it’s in her meticulously constructed monologues that Riley “skewers” Putnam’s ego (it’s a verb that has thrust its way to the fore of several reviews of her work), exposing him through the way that he uses language to assert control. Here he is brooding to Laura on the death of Shove’s (purely fictitious) predecessor, George, a second father to Putnam and a mentor who had given him “such confidence in life”:
“When I think about George…” he said.
“Ah. But you don’t care about George,” he said. “Of course. Why would you?”
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said.
“I don’t want anything from you,” he said.
“I’m a nobody,” he said. “I am. Why are you upset?”
“No one’s talking about you,” he said. “Does everything have to be about you?”
“Apparently it does,” he said.
“Huh,” he said, mildly, sighingly.
Riley is a writer who knows how to conjure significance out of silence. Laura doesn’t need to say a word more for her distress—or Putnam’s sudden discomfort as he peers out of his tent of self-regarding misery—to be conveyed, and felt.
As with its predecessors, The Palm House is told by a middle-aged woman trapped in the present while she struggles to come to terms with a blighted childhood and a tainted adolescence. A tentative point of connection between the novel’s main characters is offered as Putnam recalls the yearning of his widowed late father for a certain unavailable woman, a Polish waitress. The comparison feels as pointless as Riley’s teasing allusions to an unachieved visit by Laura, Putnam, and his father to the great iron-and-glass palm house at Kew. It’s never quite clear what significance Decimus Burton’s Victorian wonder palace is meant to have, other than—possibly and unsatisfactorily—to compare Putnam and Laura to plants reared in hothouse conditions.
The book’s cover leaves less doubt about its function. Riley personally selected its disturbing image, a famous Bill Brandt photo of two suggestively elevated naked legs. Brandt’s artfully angled photo turns the viewer into a voyeur. It heralds the secret camera that records a docile Laura, aged fifteen, being probed, examined, and then fucked in the grubby London flat of Chris Patrick, a popular comedian whom she admires. He instructs his young visitor to lift her legs, then to spread them before he twists her head toward the camera’s eye. Anxious only not “to get anything wrong,” Laura does just as she is told. Later she remembers tipping her head back to stop Chris Patrick from ripping her hair out. She thinks her eyes must have looked like those of “a frightened horse.” Once home, she treats her inflamed skin with cream (as he advised her) and pessaries, and the pain subsides. She doesn’t tell her mother.
It’s a shocking episode, all the more so for being told in simple, unemotional language. More disturbing still is the fact that about a week before this adventure, Laura’s mother, spotting her daughter in the bathroom trying on a set of ill-fitting Topshop underwear, guesses its purpose and thinks it funny: “‘Ooh, lucky Chris!’ my mother said, having stuck her head in, and then she ducked out, laughing, with her hands over her head, as I scrambled to get down and shut the door.”
Riley’s work can make for difficult reading, not just because it contains scenes that may provoke a shudder but because the reader is never allowed to trust what is being asserted. Here Laura seems to be telling the truth. Later, recalling a time when she was sleeping intermittently with an ego-driven actor, Lawrence Wells, she admits that her nonchalant lover had difficulty distinguishing her name from his own: “Until we meet again, Lauren!” he says after wishing her “cheery-bye” at his apartment door in a pair of torn boxer shorts.
Occasionally Lawrence summons the energy to issue a midnight command that brings an acquiescent Laura scurrying through the empty streets; more often, she’s left to wait alone when he forgets to show up for a date. Pitifully unable to grasp the gap between reality and truth, Laura can still argue that she holds all the cards. “He and I were seeing each other because I’d decided that we would,” she explains. Lawrence can’t initiate meetings or prepare for them because he’s “passive.”
“Passive” is a word that crops up regularly in Laura’s presentation of her disjointed life. Lawrence’s evident inattentiveness is due only to his disabling passivity. Recalling early encounters with her divorced father, Laura cites an example of her own disquieting passivity when he had invited her uncle Owen to join him in smelling Laura’s armpit and sharing his distaste. “Owen, I remember, had dutifully come and sniffed my armpit while my father held my arm up and said, ‘It’s not just me, is it, that’s a pretty ripe smell?’ ‘Her mother used to stink the place out,’ my father said.” Over two decades later, Laura is still troubled enough to seek reassurance from Putnam: “‘Do you think I smell?’ I said. ‘Well, we all smell a little bit, don’t we? But no, not unusually so.’ ‘I knew it,’ I said. ‘What a rotter.’ ‘Well, indeed…’ said Putnam.” Once again the reader is forced to consider the wisdom of relying on information relayed by a woman who, in midlife, still frets about that vicious little scene from her adolescence.
The Palm House feels less like a bold step toward a new approach than a temporary halt by the wayside. It’s very good but no match for its astonishing predecessors. The relationship between Laura and her parents does not benefit from a toning down of Riley’s habitual savagery. It’s only in the encounter between the comedian and a young girl who hasn’t learned enough about the world to distrust his genial manner (“Fank you for my visit,” Chris Patrick simpers after escorting a deflowered Laura to the station for her long journey home) that Riley chills the blood. Elsewhere, with a rain-drenched scene in which Laura holds aloft a flimsy umbrella after a grieving Putnam scatters his father’s ashes over the river he had loved, she conjures sadness from a single eloquent phrase: “Wet hair, now; wet hands and face.”
The novel ends with Shove being ejected from Sequence (just as Laura had always predicted) and Putnam unexpectedly back in place as editor-at-large. And Laura? She’s lying in the bath of her new home, a run-down residence purchased with the proceeds from the sale of her dead father’s last house. The place is a mess, derelict and so freezing that she has to work in a hat and scarf. Lying in a “too-hot bath,” Laura clings to the shower hose “as if it were a tube strap.” “What next?” she wonders. “I lay in the bath and I wondered.” The answer isn’t clear.