The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
The name Gwendoline Riley has quietly become a handshake among people who know contemporary literature. And the secret is out, as April’s launch at the New York Review of Books Imprints will undoubtedly prove. This, her seventh book, is sure to be one of the most praised new releases of the year, and many will be surprised if it isn’t recognised by the Booker panel. All the elements of a Riley novel are here: the gin-clear prose, the brevity, the numbly watchful narrator, the free jazz of real speech, and of course the ice-cold humour. More unusually, the story is one of friendship, redemption, and undeceived hope.
For anyone unfamiliar with the author or her career, it began with immediate acclaim almost 25 years ago, since when she has been steadily crafting her intricate miniatures. Earlier on it was characterised by a boozy, Jean Rhys fatalism quite unlike any of her peers. Now an FRSL, having won the winning the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, shortlisted for almost every other, and much celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic (while still only in her forties) she has reached her imperial phase: her last novel was book of the year everywhere and earned the highest praise from no less a spread of voices than David Nicholls, Sarah Perry, and the New Yorker’s James Wood. In 2018 the TLS named her one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today. An amazing feat for someone whose novels don’t seem at all bookish.
The Palm House
The plot of The Palm House, as returning readers might expect, is without contrivance. It follows two writer friends: Putnam, a senior periodical editor, faces a crisis brought about by his integrity and grief. Laura, the narrator, is in the final stages of outgrowing her ordinary early traumas by assuming her full adult guise. Aside from that there are walk-on parts for broader characters, some barely-visible character exposition, and much understated jeopardy; all of which perfectly render metropolitan middle-age in the 2020s.
As the narrative is made up of dispassionate observations with little reference to Laura’s inner life, Riley’s living spaces reveal much about their occupants. The unreachable mother in her pinched, private quarters. The aging, alcoholic thesp living in aristocratic squalor. The show-home spiderweb of the control-freak. And against these is Putnam’s flat: a performance-free oasis of communication and quiet. Here silences can stand, friends can wander, personal questions can coil in and out of conversation, and even the cat’s peccadillos are warmly understood. No wonder Laura is protective.
Good Conversation
As with the characters’ houses, the habits of communication given to the short cast list in The Palm House are a kind of judgement on them. Speech is really the key to the novel. The actor speaks as you’d expect: pompously and floridly leaning on a threadbare charisma. The bellowed slogans of an inane moderniser threatening the future of the magazine. A predatory 90s celebrity is all chat-show cutesiness and mockney bonhomie, the malignancy of which gradually becomes unavoidable. And as in My Phantoms (2021), the brittle mother hides behind a one-way mirror of cliché, hoping to seem anything but un-normal. Good conversation vouchsafes the other particularly likeable friend, Craig: speculating as to the actor’s potential tailspin, he and Laura have a laugh-out-loud routine reminiscent of Muriel Spark or Rosemary Tonks:
“It could be that he’s done […] Drinking that much.”
“Don’t forget the processed meat,” I said.
“There we go,’ Craig said. ‘Same thing. Death wish.”
In Laura’s childhood home there was a “terrific inhibition around substantive conversation” and in a later house-share, each of the young women habitually walked around “with her headphones in.” Describing a childhood #MeToo encounter, Laura writes, “At the time, nothing occurred to me. I just registered.” This is her learned self-preservation: look out, don’t look in, hug your knees, wait it out. It’s shown to work, too: Laura averts a potential crisis in a near-stranger’s house by carefully not reacting to the drunken menace closing in. It takes a second reading to fully appreciate that this is a set-piece of immense subtlety.
Lost in Translation
The unforced “substantive conversation” she enjoys with Putnam, whether they discuss the death of a parent, dissect people they’ve known, or simply understand each other with a sub-vocalized “Mm,” makes everything else bearable. It’s reminiscent of the unheard words exchanged at the end of Lost in Translation: a bubble of perfect, private understanding while the city bustles dumbly about them.
If any of that sounds worthy or austere, don’t be put off: it’s urgent and humane; it makes you feel deeply without telling you to, and washes it down with dry martini humour. For all its spareness, Riley’s prose has that effect common to distinctive stylists: it’s catchy. After reading the book you hear your own thoughts form as irrefutable, bleakly funny observations. And although Riley’s pared-down detachment is justly celebrated, I’ve rarely felt so bereft to leave a character as when I closed the book on Putnam.
AI will tell you that the title is a reference to a section of Kew Gardens, which features in, or close to, the action. Whether or not that is the case, the title draws attention to an encounter in a palmist’s room. Instead of telling Laura her fortune, she near- miraculously rids her of the warts on her hand. Laura enters “blighted” by private shame and leaves to find herself marvelling at the “fresh, pink, scored skin.” If Laura and Putnam can only bear the tawdry theatrics of the real world, freedom awaits.
(c) Peter Lonsdale
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