"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.