Gwendoline Riley

Neve is a writer who lives with an older man named Edwyn. Their life together is not exactly loving—more of a co-existence of mutual tolerance. Neve is pragmatic. For much of her life she's been doing what she must in order to survive, and one of the things she must do is put up with Edwyn’s neurotic episodes. They do “cuddle,” and from time to time enjoy one another’s company. But as if a switch has been flicked, Edwyn turns on her with paranoid, often nonsensical accusations (for show more instance, he claims she is out to “annihilate” him), and shrill, belittling insults. His problem seems to be with women in general: he sits in front of the television and spews similarly irrational complaints at female screen characters. Neve’s voice as she tries to talk him down from his mounting rage is calm and measured, but also ineffective. Their life together consists of cheerful periods of intimacy followed by days of icy, combative silence, times during which Neve questions her own sanity for staying with him. The narrative also delves into Neve’s past, her family life with a bullying father and an emotionally disengaged mother. Gwendoline Riley deliberately holds her reader at a distance: the novel is tersely written in clipped prose that generates almost unbearable tension. We observe Neve going through her days, but we never get close to her, never get the opportunity to really understand what makes her tick. But the novel fascinates for precisely this reason. Though it’s her story and she’s narrating, Neve remains elusive: indistinct and unknowable. Reading the book is like following someone through zigzagging streets, someone who keeps to the shadows, who, just as we catch a glimpse of her, slips out of sight, and who remains—constantly, tantalizingly—out of reach.

In First Love, Gwendolin Riley’s brilliant, disturbing fifth novel, she presents a marriage as a minefield or toxic warzone, seething with hazard, a place where there are no winners, only losers. show less

A good book, but, as many, many other reviewers have mentioned, not an easy one to read. While Bridget is the ostensible narrator of "My Phantoms", the book's focus is really her mother, Helen, who reads less like a character and more like a human void. Awkward, judgmental, superior and cruel, she seems less like a person than someone trying and failing to figure out what the point of being a human being is. It's hard to avoid clichés when talking about Helen's behavior: she knows the words show more but not the music; she goes through the motions; the lights are on but there's nobody home. Bridget's father, on the other hand, is a loud, obnoxious oik — to use the British term — whose very much taken with himself and seemingly unaware of everybody around him. Her step-father, if you can believe it, is very much the same, but somehow even worse. Should Gwendoline Riley have decided to write "My Phantoms" from a different perspective, it could have been an "Matilda" for adults, sans, of course, anything like a happy ending. It's likely that Roald Dahl, who apparently wasn't a terribly pleasant fellow himself, is somewhere in the afterlife giving this one high marks.

The author's description of Hellen's behavior — and of her fraught relationship with her daughter — is excruciatingly precise, and while Bridget isn't her mother, the author is also good at hinting at, but not necessarily underlining, the damage that she suffered under her mother's care. This is the sort of book where absence is its own kind of presence. It also deserves credit for analyzing but not psychologizing Bridget's awful parents. You could probably use the term "narcissist" to describe her father, and one of her aunt's has gone no contact with her mother and doesn't regret it. But Riley not everyone can make that choice and a diagnosis isn't necessarily a full explanation for someone's behavior. As its title hints, if "My Phantoms" does anything, it fully explores the enormous, long-lasting emotional pain that a handful of dysfunctional psychological processes can cause. One gets the sense that our narrator has survived and has indeed improved herself, but there's no sense of triumph here. That goes very much against the grain of dozens of midlife memoirs, movies, and novels whose characters face difficult circumstances, but it might actually be more realistic than many of those narratives. Oof. Four stars. show less

My Phantoms, Gwendoline Riley, author; Hannah Curtis, narrator
This is such a tenderly told tale of a family forced to come to grips with their relationships, past and present, as terminal illness and death loom. They have to explore their feelings and the reasons for them as they react to the current trauma. Was their behavior justified? Bridget is forced to face her own life as she now must deal with her mother’s, and as she relates little anecdotal moments, the reader gets a picture of show more the way the family interacts with each other.
Bridget’s mother is Helen Grant. Once her family had lived in Venezuela where her father was a photographer for the Shell Oil Chemical Company. Helen pretty much married to escape her home which was anything but peaceful for her. As she puts it, though, she left home and married simply because that was what was done at that time. Helen was born in 1945 and seemed to consider herself a child of the 60’s. She loved to travel. Eventually, she had two children. One, a very devoted daughter, Michelle; the other, Bridget, who is very angry and resentful and has hardly seen her mother since she left home, a home which was not a happy place for her.
Helen, called Hen because of how she pronounced her name as she learned to talk, seems self-absorbed or, perhaps, even distracted. The children’s father, Lee Grant, seems passive-aggressive, perhaps, even cruel at times. Hen eventually leaves him. Bridget, eventually also leaves her family, as Helen did, and she rarely looks back. She, like her mother, found peace leaving home.
Although Helen kept busy, she was rarely content; she often complained, and had two failed marriages. Bridget and Michelle are both unmarried, living with partners, and have no children. Bridget leaves the care of her mother to her sister and rarely helps out or shows up, unless it is an emergency.
As Bridget tells the story, almost in a conversation with the reader, her anger and disappointment with her parents reveals itself. Her mother’s sarcasm and passive-aggression come alive. They both seem to quietly torment each other. It seems that some personality traits have passed on through the generations.
The author has captured the intense relationships of the family members and explores the subtle evidence of their frustration with each other, their anger that sometimes seems to seethe below the surface, and the way they deal with each other. Michelle is the devoted daughter who steps in to help all the time, apparently without resentment. She and her partner care for her mother, seemingly willingly, though there is no way that Bridget would take on the same responsibility,anyway. She has resisted even introducing her mother to her partner, David, for years.
As the three family members are explored in detail, only one seems likeable to me, since she is somewhat sympathetic, another somewhat self absorbed, and the final one marches to her own drummer. The events and the reasons that have created their personalities dance across the page. This seems like a family tortured by dysfunctional relationships that never morphed into better ones until it seemed to be too late. Their secrets and inability to deal with the reality of their situation became a larger reality when Hen developed a brain tumor and lost even more of her lackluster comprehension of the real world.
The narrator is superb, capturing every nuance of the conversations taking place with the appropriate emphasis and emotion that takes the reader right into the moment, right into a kind of quiet emotional experience that seems ready to erupt into a maelstrom. The author explores the relationships subtly but very insightfully as she illustrates the behavior of the characters and the reasons for that behavior. show less

Laura knew Putnam from college. Later he became an editor at a literary magazine called “Sequence.” But a new editor-in-chief has made life unbearable there. For Putnam. For most of the old guard. The people who cared. Laura recognizes Putnam’s despair. One way or another, that “appalling, unmanageable unhappiness” has marked her encounters with just about everyone her whole life: her friends, her early crush, her mother. Well, her mother! But with Putnam, she yearns for it to show more pass, for him or it to move on.

Gwendoline Riley’s touch and tone here is so subtle, even deft, if that word hasn’t fallen too far out of fashion. I kept wanting to read each page, each paragraph, each sentence slower. To savour it. And then I’d find myself rushing along in spite of myself. I wish every novel I read was as compelling. But there’s nothing for it. I’ll just have to read this one again.

Easily recommended. show less