Gwendoline Riley’s New Novel Surveys the Wreckage of Middle Age

That repeated “nothing” is surely a deliberate echo of the “ ‘Nothing?’ ‘Nothing.’ ” in “King Lear,” when Lear beseeches each of his three daughters to declare the strength of their love for him, and his youngest, Cordelia, replies that she is unable to speak what is not true. The central deadlock of the play—a daughter unwilling to pander to a parental figure’s pride, a father unwilling to suffer being wounded in that way—recurs throughout Riley’s books, which are haunted by stubborn, Lear-like male egos and hard-edged women whose honesty is bracing yet often ineffectual in the face of life. “The Palm House,” in focussing its attention on Putnam, seems to ask—like so many podcasts and op-eds over the past several years—what is owed, really, to men? Yes, there’s wreckage all around, but what’s new about that?

Once Putnam has been established, the book’s relationship to both character and time shifts. The narration runs through a klatch of men Laura’s known, all of whom waver between absurd and pathetic but who are still able to harm. The worst is Chris Patrick, a comedian popular “with a certain kind of girl,” to whom Laura sent adoring tape recordings when she was young. (“It seemed awful to me that he was lonely, as he often said. ‘So lonely’ was his phrase. What a world, I thought. What could it mean that someone like that could be lonely?”) She starts going to his comedy shows, where she makes a friend, Anna. He invites them back to his hotel. He’s twenty-nine; they’re both in their teens. “Giz a squeeze,” he says. Laura describes the fantasies she and Anna have about Chris Patrick, “about a future where he had been brought low somehow and we went and found him and rescued him. No one recognized or remembered him except for us. . . . We were in our thirties, elegant and fulfilled; he was fifty, and, frankly, a wreck.” They’re smarter than him, and it’s useless in the face of age, gender, money, power. But then, even as teens, the girls sense that time will alter how that power feels and looks.

We get only a few pages about Laura’s father, by way of her uncle, Owen, who calls to report her father’s death. As in Riley’s previous two books, the novel orbits around the mother—the barnacle or spur the narrator can’t shake. But we learn enough. Owen is a bad-dad-apologist. He and his wife helped to take care of Laura’s dad late in his life. And then this: “Owen had often been there during those long half-term holidays I’d had to spend with my father. He’d seen what went on. Owen, I remember, had dutifully come and sniffed my armpit while my father had held my arm up and said, ‘It’s not just me, is it, that’s a pretty ripe smell?’ ” Laura’s life, in other words, has always been part wreck.

The book’s movements through time don’t always declare themselves. We get a page break, a new section or chapter, and then we’re in a different period, sometimes marked and sometimes not. In the place of rising action or climax, what pressure exists in the book arises from a sort of roiling helplessness. Laura sees the world so clearly: her mother’s inanities, the failures of the men she knows, the chasm between what she wishes life were and what she knows it is. But what does seeing clearly get her? Her mom is still her mom. Her body still wants sex. The rumbling aliveness of the novel comes, in part, from the friction of these facts: what does it mean, really, to know better? No matter how many years we spend reading, thinking, watching films, somehow, insanely, we still have to live. As the story’s scenes accrue, this collision creates a sense, if not of agency or of power (which is perhaps the stuff of heroes), at least of stamina, the recognition that more and more life, more and more looking at it, can generate its own sort of strength.

Just once, Laura tries to explain her mother to Putnam. He immediately pins her down: “Northern . . . this annihilating flippancy . . . everything I’ve fought against for my whole life.” Laura’s annoyed enough never to try again, and also has to admit that most of what he says is true. Her mother is flip. She’ll do most anything for “a laff,” as Putnam says. And yet, in the scene immediately preceding this one, Laura has met up with her mother and her erstwhile boyfriend. Her mother’s been laid off and says—flippantly—that she might spend the time revisiting all the places she’s lived, “just as a project.” Laura suggests that it “could tell a story . . . a bit of social history. Where life has taken you.” The conversation drifts. The subject is dropped.