Chills of the Unsaid

“Considering one’s life requires a horribly delicate determination, doesn’t it?” observes Neve, the narrator of Gwendoline Riley’s First Love (2017). That acridly painful novel was followed by My Phantoms (2021), thought by many to be her finest study of what had been—until The Palm House—her favorite subject: dysfunctional families.* More boldly than their four predecessors, First Love and My Phantoms strip the veils away from the contortions that Riley’s self-justifying storytellers must perform to gain approval for their past acts of desperate abnegation, withdrawal, and measured unkindness.Probing the past in search of a truth that will exonerate them has always both obsessed and frustrated Riley’s anxious characters. “You wake,” Neve continues, “and your dreams disband, in a mid-brain void.” And so the search resumes. It takes time for the reader to appreciate that Riley, a consummately manipulative novelist, is stage-managing a combat between her readers’ moral judgment and the questionable behavior for which a female narrator seeks validation.Conflicted feelings about past events first became significant in Riley’s third novel, Joshua Spassky (2007). Spassky’s lover, Natalie...