PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksA reader feels intrusive, as uncomfortable with what appears to be genuine happiness as with genuine vitriol. Riley draws out the perverse invasiveness of reading about a couple. She invites the reader into their relationship but doesn’t provide quite enough for us to understand what we are witnessing. What do these two see in each other? Why does Neve stay with this man? Maybe she doesn’t even know ... We are strangers to ourselves and to one another. The novel reminds us of this again and again. Neve and Edwyn’s conversations are riddled with misunderstandings, some of them willful. I found myself flipping back a few pages, trying to find where in each interaction things started to go wrong, trying to pinpoint a word or a phrase ... There’s delight and horror in the entomologist’s art: stick a thin pin into that dry bug body, fix it to the hard white board ... Riley’s lucid prose whips the reader up into a swift reading pace. One cannot help but whisper aloud this painful-to-read dialogue, which captures the oddness of spoken language with all its inflections of dialect and grammatical oddities. There is an unpolished, transcript-like quality to Riley’s dialogue, so much so that it often reads with the out-of-place disjointedness of a Beckett play. No matter how well Neve is able to dissect her mother’s failings in her private internal monologue, in conversation, language arrives to the other in a garbled state, as if transported by the telephone game ... I prefer the looser First Love over the more focused My Phantoms — but with every effort, you can feel Riley honing her craft. She is perfecting a particular kind of despair.
Gwendoline Riley
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe characters are familiar, but the book’s focus is tighter ... With each book, Riley reenters a similar despair and tries once again to capture its shape and feeling. This isn’t to say that each new book is an improvement over its predecessors — I prefer the looser First Love over the more focused My Phantoms — but with every effort, you can feel Riley honing her craft. She is perfecting a particular kind of despair.
