My Phantoms is Riley’s sixth novel, and her best. A work of tightly compressed brilliance, it shares many elements with her previous books: a coolly observant narrator, characters who spend a lot of time in distressed contemplation of how their lives look to others, a preoccupation with self-deception and its corrosive effects, a lucidly expressed vision of a grim, stunted Englishness. Much of what makes it so extraordinary is present from its opening lines: Riley can create fully realized characters largely through snatches of speech, sketching out the contours of a dysfunctional relationship in an exchange ... one of the great achievements of My Phantoms is the way it shows how people can become closer even when they remain utterly baffled by each other ... Riley’s language is economical, her style cool, her humor ironic—yet the emotional pitch of the work as a whole is almost intolerably high ... At times I caught myself reading the book as if it were a detective novel, paging backward and forward in an effort to understand how exactly Riley managed to insert such a feral, panicked heartbeat into a work of such impeccable control. I returned to the book over and over again, underlining every second sentence, littering the spaces between paragraphs with question marks, periodically holding it as far away from my face as I could in case I might see something I’d missed earlier.
There is a fascinating tension between Riley’s concision—the books are slim, and her honed sentences can encapsulate a character in a few short words—and this expansive reworking of her subject area ... it’s easier to outrun a bad father than a bad mother, and the figure of Helen Grant here is more complicated, nuanced and interesting—to Bridget as well as to the reader—than her awful dad ... This is a brilliant portrait of a mother-daughter relationship in which every encounter is a battle because both sides want something more, or different, than the other will give ... sober, understated, subtle ... the forensic quality of Bridget’s attention is fuelled by imaginative sympathy as well as distance and disgust. As the book goes on, in all its horrible, funny, uncomfortable truthfulness, it feels increasingly like a complicated act of love.
... simplifies its narrator’s adult life—one contented partnership, one job, no friends worth mentioning—and as a result has a sharpness of focus that makes it Riley’s most unsparing novel, and her best ... Riley’s novels, consisting mainly of dialogue, work a kind of magic: Edwyn’s unhinged rants and Helen’s verbal tics and long, repetitive accounts of being slighted or overlooked are at once believably maddening and oddly addictive. Having to listen to these monologues would be unbearable, and yet to read them—to witness their absurdity without being their audience—offers a perverse pleasure.
Riley’s novels get under your skin. My Phantoms is unsettling for many reasons—the way it picks at the scab of unconditional love, the way it interrogates questions of inheritance and influence. More than anything, though, it’s the fact that it chips away at the compact between reader and narrator, asking us to examine the natural bond of sympathy that springs between the storyteller and her audience ... with quiet brutality, Riley charts the impossibility of communication, the viciousness with which each defends their territory. The end, when it comes, is devastating, bleak, unforgettable.
Her distinctive first-person voice, uncompromising and clear, is once more telling a story of baffled disaffection ... The pleasures of inventive plot are not in evidence. Instead, the exercise of exact observation, and an extraordinarily accurate ear for the rhythms of dialogue, seize the reader’s attention. Riley misses nothing, and her icy evocations of dysfunction and distress are unforgettable ... Hen’s defenceless vulnerability emerges more clearly, and Bridget’s edged memories of her valiantly useless gestures of defiance are punctuated with moments of profound pathos ... she tells her story with such lucidity that it is hard not to delight in her piercing gaze. But we are also conscious of an element of self-justification hidden in the twists and turns of Bridget’s story.
The novel’s pathos derives from its stunted relationships, the vicious cycle of discontentment that continues until Helen’s death ... a distilled psychological tour de force from an exceptional writer. Riley has a mimic’s ear for feeble gags, absurd catchphrases and pretension. Even her punctuation is withering; rarely have exclamation marks looked so desperately cheerful, inverted commas so mocking. From minute, quotidian details—impasses, the unsaid—Riley weaves a painfully funny and acute study of disappointment, self-delusion, unbridgeable fissures and the conflicting forces of loyalty, pity, vexation and guilt.
... burst[s] with these sorts of aching dialogues, punctuated with endings that come out of nowhere—a knife stabbing a proclamation to a wall. Riley works with nervy, precise syntax, striking a tone that you might call prim if it weren’t also slightly off-key ... Riley’s work, though resonant in the present day—when love languages and attachment theory are common parlance—also has a timeless nuance. She slows her scenes down, like a record played at half speed, to reveal the hidden undertow beneath two people trying to reach each other ... These episodes of domestic dislocation reminded me, at certain moments, of Raymond Carver’s lost, love-hungry men and women. Like Carver’s, Riley’s characters lunge at one another again and again, trying to get a moment of pure human connection and coming away instead with bruises ... Riley’s characters are under no illusions as to their own agency. Instead, they seem painfully aware of how they’re at the mercy of their fears, patterns, and insecurities.
[Riley] She knows just how to get her characters through the doorway and into a scene—all that they have to do, in order to sign their own moral death warrants, is start talking ... Novels that so emphatically lack charity threaten to enroll the guilty reader in nothing more than the author’s hellish vengeance. They can seem hard to justify. One has the sense, reading Riley, of being involved in an alarming experiment, that of reading the world without the slightest mercy or compromise. But at least, in this state of nature, the dynamics of survival and damage are usefully laid bare ... Another result of Riley’s experiment in unillusioned dissection is that we truly see her characters, in their descriptive nakedness, alive and horridly vivid ... One thing that heartlessly unsentimental writing does is force the reader to generate the very sympathy such books lack ... In fact, My Phantoms is not without its glimmers of charity and compassion, and it’s a better novel than First Love for them.
Riley has a beautiful way of cataloguing memories and earmarking unpleasant experiences with a visually arresting turn of phrase ... the story is written from Bridget’s perspective, the narration is not inward-looking, and readers are left to figure out much about Bridget on their own because of the narrator’s aloofness and reluctance to reveal too much about herself. Bridget appears cold and detached, not just from her parents but even her sister, who is curiously absent from most of the story. My Phantoms effectively captures the ennui of our times, and while the lack of a clear resolution might make for an unsatisfactory conclusion for some readers, it rounds up the raw ingenuity of this book well.
The 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.
In My Phantoms, Riley’s sharp, funny and coolly devastating new novel, parents take centre stage. The book’s narrator, Bridget, is barely there—present only to tell the story of her mother’s life with blistering clarity, and of what it was like to be her daughter ... Riley has the ability to draw out the subtle workings and cruelties of relationships and psyches, and wrest them into compact, hard-hitting stories. We should hope that Riley goes on as she has done, her female characters—complex minds, written with sharp intelligence and humour—ageing in line with her own passage through adulthood. If she does, she will produce a legacy of unflinchingly told stories about the lives of contemporary women.
... riveting ... Riley writes about ordinary life with a mordant clarity that recalls the writing of Alice Munro and Denis Johnson. The dialogue is superb, yet you are aware of the gap between what is being said and what’s really going on. Like many female writers of her generation, she strains at the idea that women in fiction need to be likeable. Her characters are misfits, hard to place.
... an affecting story about the complicated relationship between a daughter and her two parents ... Riley’s incisive dialogue and astute observations of family dynamics offer a sympathetic and painful perspective on both estrangement and the choices people make in order to survive parents who maybe should have never been parents at all. The result is a fine addition to Riley’s notable body of work.
