Bound forward with a vibrating force... Tightly contained ... The effect is that of a metal detector held close to the ground, finding the spaces that complicate and contradict whatever assumptions we might feel compelled to make about others ... Riley is much too sharp a writer to pose and answer a single question in her fiction. Being inside her novels is a singular, spiky, often deeply funny experience. But, insofar as The Palm House casts its keen eye on men, it lingers on the ways that stories about heroes, about conquering and winning, about what men are owed and deserve, can be just as much of a trap as the stories told to women about what we are or aren’t.
Stark, exacting ... Achieves a clarity of vision when it comes to human behavior. Among American writers, Riley resembles Lydia Davis for the fine calibration and fragility of her sentences ... Relative to her previous two novels, there is something clipped and minimalist about The Palm House, but satisfyingly so, narrative threads trimmed just as they threaten to take over the book.
One doesn’t read Riley for plot; each book is an assemblage of episodes. She wields dialogue like a Swiss army knife, now corkscrewed, now serrated, but always coming to a short, sharp point. Her characters are divided between those who are keenly interested in mulling over the past and those who are dulled by obliviousness ... One of Riley’s signature tricks is to stack dialogue in this way, sculpting long pauses and meaningful repetitions into something like poetic prosody ... Riley’s prose, like a greenhouse, is equal parts brittle transparency and wrought-iron strength.
Tender for a Riley novel, offering a quiet redemption in enduring friendships, where understanding can still take root in rare, flickering moments ... The Palm House is digressive, arranged like an emptied pocket, with spareness that can come off as thinness, as much blank space as ellipsis ... There is a thrilling element to Riley’s work that is amniotic-dark.
A finely observed and highly oblique portrayal of London bohemians. It is a book that leads with its rigorously achieved style, which is stripped down, dryly unsentimental and keenly attuned to the tensions present in families and friendships ... Evokes fragile feelings of vulnerability and longing among her characters, while gesturing toward a potential for contentedness in community and intellectual integrity ... What I missed amid the novel’s deft personality critiques was precisely what Laura sees in her friends ... In this talented author’s relentless paring back, too many interesting things have been cut away.
Tender for a Riley novel, offering a quiet redemption in enduring friendships, where understanding can still take root in rare, flickering moments ... The Palm House is digressive, arranged like an emptied pocket, with spareness that can come off as thinness, as much blank space as ellipsis. Scenes accrete with puzzling relation, the past and the present drift up and overlay one another ... Riley seems to be asking what, if anything, can we keep of the disappearing world—traditions, relationships, a way of being—and is clear-eyed in the face of nostalgia: Things weren’t always better ... There is a thrilling element to Riley’s work ... Suffused with a susurrating darkness.
A delicate and autumnal novel, pared-back yet bristling with quiet tangents, about the mysteries of friendship and what it means to find yourself becoming history ... These characters are scathing but often tender, capable of turning on a dime (or sixpence) on the narrator ... Does The Palm House supply a model for elegant survival? Probably not. Riley does, however, give her struggling characters something new, perhaps the cruelest thing she can think of: a happy ending.
Nostalgia permeates the drama ... The Palm House is a novel about getting older under the influence of the same cautionary tales as in her earlier books, but it’s not nearly so panicky ... The relative lightness of The Palm House comes from the way the burden of inheritance is generalized, and shared.
A composite, shifting portrait of the way life actually is, or has been, or might be, gradually emerges, though it is also mediated, partial ... How does Riley achieve these effects – 'murky effects', as the novel’s opening line describes a London turned orange by Saharan dust – on such a small and tightly stretched canvas? There are tiny stylistic details that, while they appear trifling alone, accrete to form something distinctive ... Individually accomplished, they are collectively mesmerizing in their acuity.
The Palm House might be her most tender book to date ... Exceptionally keen ... If Riley’s project is to have an outlook, it might be this: To live is to endure great hardship, and then to keep going.
Sometimes funny, sometimes devastating ... A satire on the London literary scene ... Riley shows that her primary concern is with language: its specificity and its quiet betrayals.
Lacks her usual virtuosity ... The Palm House is an unnerving anomaly: a book by Riley written in ordinary ink. It lacks a pressing subject, that unmistakable sense of aboutness ... The novel’s central, or anyway most prolonged, drama – for want of a better word – is essentially shop talk ... Although Riley doesn’t put a foot wrong, she puts fewer feet right than one has come to expect ... Maybe one should think of The Palm House as an experimental novel, or a transitional one.
Riley has long enjoyed critical acclaim for her particular style of novel: unflinching, keenly observed portrayals of contemporary British life, narrated by complicated women who inhabit difficult relationships with their usually somewhat less sophisticated mothers. Nobody does it better. Riley’s novels are slight, but strong. Completely devoid of sentimentality but rich in human truth. Her seventh offering, The Palm House, follows form ... This novel can be read in one sitting; it is so engaging that it proves impossible not to. Readers don’t turn to Riley for elaborate plots. Instead, what she offers has much higher stakes: how do we navigate and survive ordinary lives? Finding beauty in the banality of everyday human suffering is what typically elevates her work to something extraordinary. In this incarnation, however, her pristine prose soars.
A triumph of non-sentimental nostalgia ... Acute ... Riley’s novels draw their energy from tense relationships and cringeworthy encounters, depicted with pitiless clarity. Her instinct is to probe the fault lines between the comic and the horrific ... A reflective melancholy gathers almost by stealth, settling in the spaces between sentences.
Riley’s work recasts our relationship with the familiar, transforming ordinary, unremarkable lives of her characters into something startling and new ... Riley’s disquieting acuity and her spare and unsparing prose makes them shimmer with tension. She has a phenomenal ear for dialogue, for the myriad ways in which people unknowingly lay themselves bare, both in what they say and, more agonisingly, in what they don’t – or can’t. She is the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour edged with the vertiginous lurch of despair ... A slim, impeccably controlled story that contains multitudes.
Everything in The Palm House seems almost understated, many of its scenes the simple passing ones of young intellectual life in London, but in her careful and deliberate presentation and precise style Riley allows much that goes unsaid to effectively reverberate ... Though The Palm House can seem slight and adrift, it also holds a mesmerizing power. A neat achievement.
Riley’s particular ear for linguistic nuance and eye for pinpoint detail are as distinctive as ever ... Riley elevates the everyday to exceptional heights.
