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.
