"First Love" and "My Phantoms," by Gwendoline Riley

I only very recently heard of the English writer Gwendoline Riley, probably partly because it seems that only her newest books are widely available in the United States. I just read her 2017 novel, “First Love” (New York Review Books) and her 2021 novel, “My Phantoms” (New York Review Books), and found these short (under 200 pages each) books to be rather bleak but compelling. The main characters of each, Neve of “First Love” and Bridget of “My Phantoms,” are very similar in some ways, with life circumstances perhaps somewhat similar to those of the author (based on the limited information I found about her). For Neve and Bridget, these include connections to Manchester, England; difficult childhoods with very difficult parents; enmeshed and fraught relationships between both of the two main characters as adults and their mothers; work as writers or academics. Each daughter struggles with a push-pull relationship with her mother: both enmeshed and fraught. The daughters avoid seeing their mothers much, and dread their meetings, but they feel responsible for them as well, and try to do their duty by them. In the case of “First Love,” the other major relationship portrayed is the extremely complicated and often terribly contentious relationship between Neve and her older husband Edwyn. Neve is almost always on tenterhooks with Edwyn, never knowing what will set him off. One of Riley’s strengths in this novel is her vivid (uncomfortably so) depictions of marital conversations, fights, and reconciliations. The last chapter of “First Love” is a masterpiece, albeit a painful one, describing a scene between Neve and Edwyn in which they both – but mostly Edwyn – use words as weapons, turn every remark or memory into something horrible, and cannot let the other one ever “win.” Riley is a genius at showing the particular cruelty that people who know each other well, and can use that knowledge as ammunition, can perpetrate on their partners. It is a scene that both rings true and devastates not only the characters but the reader. Both novels are depressing in their depictions of family, yet there is always a kernel of love, care, and responsibility as well, and conventions are often maintained, if barely and if with very little enthusiasm. So, yes, these books are bleak. The appeal to me, as always, is in learning from the way human relationships are rendered in these novels.

"The Poet's House," by Jean Thompson

Jean Thompson is an author whose work I have sometimes admired and enjoyed very much, and at other times felt disappointed with (see my posts of 5/24/11, 5/17/13, 8/12/16, and 12/21/18). Because I did like the last novel I read by her, “A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl,” (see my 12/21/18 post), and because the description and reviews of her newest novel intrigued me, I read “The Poet’s House” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2022). I was not disappointed. The book has many elements that I enjoy in fiction, including characters who are writers; detailed, vivid descriptions of the world of poets and poetry (retreats, workshops, publishers, etc.); characters who are well-written; complex relationships among the various characters (writers or not); and a setting in Marin County, California, where I live. The main character is a young woman, Carla, currently a landscaper, who is a bit at sea about what is next in her life, and who has recently “discovered” the joys and attractions of poetry through meeting a leading poet named Viridiana, who takes her up as a kind of assistant and friend. Carla, and her life, are greatly influenced by Viridiana and by the other people in the world of writers whom Carla now meets and interacts with. There is plenty of plot moving the story along, and I enjoyed that, but the best parts of "The Poet's House" are the portrayals of the world of poets and the well-drawn, sometimes with notes of satire, characters who are both “types” (and fun to guess who they might be modeled on!) and complete originals.

"Frances and Bernard," by Carlene Bauer

A fictionalized version of the relationship between two famous writers? I am so there for a book like that! Actually the publicity for the novel “Frances and Bernard” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), by Carlene Bauer, only claims that the book is “inspired by the lives of" Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, a surprise to me. Like any good English major, I knew the work of each of these great authors to some extent, but did not know, or at least did not remember knowing, that they had a long, close friendship. This novel imagines that the relationship went further, into the realm of a romantic affair; however, everything I read to check on this says that in real life their relationship was almost entirely through letters. Notably, this novel is also written through letters, but the letters (between the two writers, and to and from their friends and editors) refer to many actual meetings between the two writers. So, although the story is based loosely on two brilliant and intense writers, the real pleasures of reading this novel are the explorations of the two fictional characters, Frances and Bernard, of their support of each other during difficult times, of their shared struggle with questions of religion and philosophy, and of that intangible, unclassifiable connection that sometimes happens between two people, irrespective of specifiable labels for their relationships. The writing is beautiful, and combines the pleasures of plot with those of character and of meaningful exploration of the complexities of life.