{"id":153992,"date":"2021-08-12T12:30:05","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T16:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=153992"},"modified":"2021-08-12T12:30:05","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T16:30:05","slug":"the-heart-of-the-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/08\/12\/the-heart-of-the-trouble\/","title":{"rendered":"The Heart of the Trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Gwendoline Riley. Photo: Adrian Lourie \/ Writer Pictures. Courtesy of Granta Books.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 2007 Gwendoline Riley, then age twenty-eight and already the author of three acclaimed novels, described her writing life as lacking \u201cany tremendous triumph or romance\u2014I feel like I\u2019m just always trying to be accurate, to get everything in the correct proportion.\u201d<\/p>\n

As literary aspirations go, it sounds modest. And by superficial measures, Riley\u2019s novels are unambitious: light on conventional plotting, narrow in scope, and told from the perspectives of women close to herself in age and background. Riley has tried using the third person, she said in 2012, but it \u201calways sounds so false.\u201d As for adopting a male point of view: \u201cUgh, men\u2019s brains! That vipers\u2019 nest? No.\u201d Her protagonists are writers, too, encouraging the frequent assumption that she draws directly from life. But to regard Riley\u2019s fiction as titivated memoir is to misperceive what beguiles her readers: not barely mediated personal experience but its sedulous transmutation by a strange, rare talent. As Vivian Gornick wrote after reading the letters of Jean Rhys, a novelist with whom Riley shares some kinship: \u201cThe letters are the life, and the novels\u2014there\u2019s no mistaking it\u2014are the magic performed on the life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor does Riley write autofiction, if authors in that contentious category aim to replicate the texture of life by dispensing with, in Rachel Cusk\u2019s now famous words, the \u201cfake and embarrassing\u201d architecture of novels. When Riley makes you squirm with recognition, it\u2019s not because of any explicit overlap between author and protagonist or winking acknowledgment of the writing process. Her uncannily observed female character studies, with their bracing emotional clarity, ruthlessly crafted scenes, and consummate use of the telling detail, belong instead to a certain feminist-existentialist tradition of realism. Literary forerunners to Riley\u2019s work include Rhys\u2019s interwar novels of female alienation, as well as Margaret Drabble\u2019s groundbreaking early novels, in which intellectual young women grapple with the hazards and potentials of their desires, thus dramatizing, as the writer Jennifer Schaffer aptly put it<\/a>, \u201ca fighting urge to disturb the mold of one\u2019s life, as it sets.\u201d Yet what sets Riley apart from even these noble antecedents is her unshrinking determination to contemplate the unseemly, the discordant, and the unsolvable, without ever straying into despair or the maudlin. <\/p>\n

Riley, who was born in London and grew up in Merseyside, published her Betty Trask Award\u2013winning debut, Cold Water<\/em>, in 2002, when she was twenty-two. Given her age, not to mention the gorgeous nouvelle vague\u2013ish author photo adorning advance copies, some preconceived skepticism about the novel\u2019s merit might have been forgivable. Forgivable, but unwarranted, because Cold Water<\/em> is an understated classic. Our heroine in holey All Stars and a dress over jeans is twenty-year-old Carmel McKisco, a barmaid of a \u201cdownbeat disposition\u201d who works in a low-lit Manchester dive, dreams of moving to Cornwall, and nurses an obsession with a failed musician whose band she loved when she was fourteen. Charting Carmel\u2019s poetic musings and alcohol-fueled gadding about, this wistful little ballad of a novel captures with great verve and originality the bittersweet exhilaration of youth, with its various diverting limerences that, in the big picture, shouldn\u2019t matter. \u201cBut, you see,\u201d Carmel explains,<\/p>\n

the point is, I\u2019m not in the big picture. I\u2019m in Manchester, and I can\u2019t afford to leave just yet \u2026 For now I walk around through the scraping wind, through puddles full of brick dust, often with my feet so cold and sodden; the flesh of my toes like soaked cotton wadding spun round the bones.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Cold Water<\/em>, rain-bleared Manchester is seen through an artist\u2019s eye. The lights in Piccadilly Gardens cast \u201can eerie medical glow against the smudge-grey sky.\u201d Some \u201cragged carnations the color of evaporated milk and tongue\u201d remind Carmel \u201cof the old recipe cards in the back of a kitchen draw at my mum\u2019s.\u201d This light-handed imbrication of visual and emotional detail to conjure atmosphere, a hallmark of Riley\u2019s early novels, makes for the kind of immersive, effortless read that\u2019s often underrated as easy to write. Here\u2019s the short story writer Esther, in 2004\u2019s Sick Notes<\/em>, describing her roommate\u2019s bedroom:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a duvet cover, framed postcards on the wall, ornaments even: dried up sea urchins, a crouching child figurine, a tiny pair of painted wooden clogs, a ship in a bottle and a Russian doll flanked by the two rubber ducks I got her for her last birthday. Also a plain brass photo frame holding a picture of a small girl standing by a piano. The kid\u2019s on tiptoe, reaching up to jab at the keys. The curtains behind her and the jumper underneath her dungarees are in sour seventies colors. Her facial expression is kind of sour too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Esther, back in Manchester after a stint in the U.S., is poised restlessly between an unhappy childhood and an uncertain future. The disorder of her own bedroom, with its cardboard boxes and unfinished books \u201cresting open on my bed like pitched roofs, like dead birds,\u201d semaphores her emphatic itinerancy. She drifts around the city with a biro in her ponytail, thinking of \u201cways to describe the sky, the clouds, the light,\u201d while dodging the perils of intimate connection. An idyllic romantic encounter with Newton, a touring American musician, affects Esther so deeply that she longs to somehow purge herself of it; the push-pull of her impulse to call him is the current around which the narrative swirls. In another writer\u2019s hands, it would be a thin premise. But Esther\u2019s chafing self-awareness as she wallows, postures, and seeks distraction is too convincing to ever feel trivial. \u201cI have this monstrous self-pity in me,\u201d she declares, \u201cand this monstrous self-love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Riley\u2019s sixth novel, My Phantoms<\/em>, was published in the UK in April and hailed, with every justification, as a masterpiece. (Bafflingly, it has no U.S. publisher.) In this portrait of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, the author has elevated her gift for psychological verisimilitude to astonishing tragicomic effect. Sixty-something Hen (short for Helen), separated from her second husband and retired, pursues an elusive sense of belonging via constant outings: Wine Circle, Victorian Society, festivals, film screenings, gallery evenings. \u201cI\u2019m putting myself out there,\u201d she tells her daughter Bridget, whose suggestions that she has a night in are met with a firm \u201cNo.\u201d Over years of dutiful phone calls, lunches, and dinners, Bridget alternates between humoring Hen\u2014managing to \u201cput a penny in the right slot\u201d\u2014and trying to reconcile her with some version of reality. Hen is in determined flight from reality, as the dramatic crux of the novel underscores. Desperate to meet Bridget\u2019s boyfriend, Hen badgers her about it until Bridget loses patience:<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want me to tell you why, Mum?\u201d I said. \u201cWhy I have to keep things separate?\u201d She didn\u2019t answer. \u201cHow many sentences do you think you could take on the subject? Three? Four? One? Could you consider and acknowledge one sentence?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Haunting them both is Bridget\u2019s late father, Lee, a mostly taboo subject. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t me<\/em> who was horrible,\u201d Hen protests, \u201cit was your dad. It wasn\u2019t me<\/em>.\u201d During Bridget\u2019s childhood, when she and her sister were legally mandated to spend every Saturday with Lee, Hen had recourse to a regular refrain: \u201cThere\u2019s no point in provoking him, is there?\u201d In Riley\u2019s merciless characterization, Hen\u2019s lexicon of well-worn phrases is a buffer against an intimidating world, the next best thing to silence, to risking no provocation at all.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s depiction of Lee, as filtered through Bridget\u2019s forensic recollection, is a graphic testament to the terroristic legacy of petty, small-minded bullies, its unflinching realism unparalleled in anything I\u2019ve read. A ceaseless fount of humiliations and mortifications, \u201cneedlings and exhortations,\u201d Lee would dismiss his daughters\u2019 interests\u2014playing football, vegetarianism\u2014with the remark: \u201cNo one\u2019s impressed with your recent behavior.\u201d Reading a book was \u201cposing\u201d or \u201cbluffing\u201d; a new haircut brought the inevitable query: \u201cDid they catch whoever did that?\u201d In Lee\u2019s self-mythology he was, Bridget reflects, \u201ca sort of beloved outlaw; an admired one-off.\u201d To her, he was less a person than a formidable and relentless phenomenon: \u201cA gripper of shoulders. A pincher of upper arms. If I was wearing a hat, a snatcher of hats. If I was reading a book, a snatcher of books. Energized bother, in short.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iterations of this character, equally unpleasant but not quite as sharply focused, appear throughout Riley\u2019s work. Novelist Aislinn, in 2012\u2019s Opposed Positions<\/em>, is estranged from her father but must contend with a sinister barrage of his unanswered emails. \u201cShowing off again are we?\u201d he writes. Then, alongside four transcribed quotes from her novel: \u201cOh dear! Oof! Posing! Er, what?\u201d One of the most appalling moments in 2017\u2019s First Love<\/em>, a novel full of jaw-dropping moments, is when the narrator, Neve, recalls being at her father\u2019s house as a teenager. In front of his male friend, he ordered her to \u201cclean up\u201d the bathroom she\u2019d just used. She was perplexed, but on close examination she found two pinpricks of blood on the toilet bowl. \u201cWomen just aren\u2019t naturally clean, are they?\u201d her father said to the friend. These are not operatic accounts of abuse \u00e0 la Hanya Yanagihara\u2019s A Little Life<\/em>; Riley\u2019s register is scrupulously uncathartic. Along with Neve, Aislinn, and Bridget you feel, deep in your guts, the banal unassuageable horrors they\u2019ve endured.<\/p>\n

First Love<\/em>, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was short-listed for the Women\u2019s Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize, saw Riley begin to pare back her already stripped-down style to examine, at unsparing close range, an intermittently poisonous marriage. Neve\u2019s older husband, Edwyn, who has a debilitating chronic illness and is prone to ferocious outbursts, casts their fighting as a replay of the rancor she had with her father. \u201cYou hated him, he was cruel to you, that\u2019s the only relationship you understand. A man being horrible to you and you being vicious back.\u201d<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t witness any viciousness from Neve, who prides herself on being \u201cwarm, attentive, mild,\u201d and yet her relationship with Edwyn is evidently one of complicated codependence. He claims to have married her because she needed to be taken care of; she likens the process of keeping him calm by saying the right thing to \u201cthrowing some sausages at a guard dog\u201d: a basic trick for someone who grew up walking on eggshells, when a wrong word \u201cunlatched a sort of chaos.\u201d The wry rhythm of Riley\u2019s prose, which anatomizes this commonplace folie \u00e0 deux with alarming efficiency, holds the reader in a helpless thrall.<\/p>\n

Our thrall is all the tighter for the glimpses we get of Neve and Edwyn\u2019s sincere affection and closeness, their silly, tender pet names (\u201clovely Mr. Pusskins,\u201d \u201clittle compost heap\u201d) and his habit of kissing her \u201crepeatingly, and with great emphasis, in the morning.\u201d Not for Riley the convenient narrative inexorability of the couple\u2019s breakup, nor the readerly consolation of their reaching a better place (a phrase beneath Neve in its triteness, apart from anything else). As in Riley\u2019s Somerset Maugham Award\u2013winning third novel, Joshua Spassky<\/em>, also a story of irresolute true love, romantic redemption is not even permitted chimerical status. \u201cWhen you hold on to another person,\u201d Joshua Spassky<\/em>\u2019s Natalie says to her titular lover, \u201cI think you\u2019re only ever really holding onto your own fathomless situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, as Riley said a few years ago: \u201cHuman beings are incorrigible. This is a source of humor and pain.\u201d Her alchemizing of this wellspring has created an extraordinary body of work, especially for an author scarcely over forty. Happily for literature, Riley seems monogamously bound to fiction as a form. She has expressed a disinclination for all other kinds of writing and doesn\u2019t use social media, a choice befitting her austere mystique. We can hope, then, for many more novels whose quietly splendid triumph is, in the words of Neve: \u201cTo get to the truth, to the heart of the trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for\u00a0<\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,\u00a0<\/em>Longreads,\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0<\/em>The Daily Beast,\u00a0<\/em>Salon,\u00a0<\/em>The Awl,\u00a0<\/em>Words without Borders, and other publications.\u00a0She was the first writer of the <\/em>Daily\u2019s Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0column.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emma Garman considers the novels of Gwendoline Riley, a rare talent who shows no signs of slowing down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-153992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Heart of the Trouble by Emma Garman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 12, 2021 \u2013 Emma Garman considers the novels of Gwendoline Riley, a rare talent who shows no signs of slowing down.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/08\/12\/the-heart-of-the-trouble\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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