brainsplotch

After reading Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House and finishing it on May 6, I returned to Riley in the final week of last month and finished her book My Phantoms on June 30. As much as I enjoyed The Palm House , I liked My Phantoms even more. It's hard to neatly describe why I find Riley's books so enjoyable and compulsively readable. There is very little action or plot twists--not that any of that matters much to me. It comes down to the sharply drawn characters and Riley's ability to notice and artfully describe the small details of ordinary life. My Phantoms is narrated by Bridget "Bridge" Grant, a 40-something academic living in London with her partner, John. Bridget's parents, Lee and Helen (aka "Hen") divorced when Bridget was two years old. Bridget has an older sister, Michelle. Early in the book, Bridget describes her and Michelle's awkward court-mandated visits with her father. Lee frequently picks on and bullies the gir...

My strategy and/or streak (of reading books that pass my desk and look promising) continues to pay dividends. I have to admit that the striking cover shot of two long and shapely legs is what initially grabbed me. The cover of Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House would lead one to believe the novel is a steamy erotic potboiler. As it turns out, there is little sex in the book and what sex there is decidedly unglamorous. The Palm House is centered on 40-something Laura Miller, a magazine editor trying to make it in contemporary London. Along the way, we meet various people in her orbit, most notably: Edmund, a 50-something friend and co-worker; Laura's somewhat prickly mother; and Lawrence Wells, an eccentric stage actor with whom Laura has a brief fling, (though it doesn't seem she enjoys any of it).  In the most compelling section of the novel, we flash back to a teenage Laura living near Liverpool. She develops an infatuation with a laddish stand-up comedian f...