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.
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.
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.
