I almost missed the titular reference in The Palm House, the latest novel from British novelist Gwendoline Riley. The narrator, a fortyish writer named Laura Miller, briefly mentions that she plans to go there with her friend Edmund Putnam and his father, to see the “ancient cycad.” It’s a living fossil, a relic of another age—and Putnam is prone to feeling that way too. “Ah, the passing of time!” he pronounces as they walk through London.
Still, it’s hard to call her novels subtle, especially taken collectively, since they all circle the same concerns, with narrators who are versions of one another. Her first two novels—published when she was in her early twenties—took place in Manchester, their narrators both young women in bars and bad relationships. Her next two books detoured to the United States but featured many of the same elements. In each, there are brutish fathers and magnetically hapless mothers. Both of those figures, but especially the mothers, dominate First Love (2017) and My Phantoms (2021), which were published simultaneously, to widespread acclaim, in the U.S. by New York Review Books in 2022. First Love is a devastating account of a woman named Neve’s marriage to an older man who berates and belittles her, a nauseating seat at their claustrophobic kitchen table leavened (if that’s the word) by Riley’s way with detail and character, and her narrator’s fundamental empathy for herself and others. My Phantoms delves further into the relationship between the narrator—this time a writer named Bridget—and her mother, Hen.
The Palm House has more of a plot than most of Riley’s novels—one that consists mostly of gossip. Sequence magazine, a venerable literary publication where Putnam is an editor and to which Laura is an occasional but long-standing contributor—has fallen victim to an attempted revamp by its corporate board. They’ve installed a young man named Simon Halfpenny, who goes by Shove. (“Yes, Shove.”) He has come to the job from a sports magazine with a sensibility that feels out of place at the rarefied Sequence; he starts writing editorials that begin, “What is it about dogs?” and “April is the cruellest month, as the poet T.S. Eliot once famously wrote.” Shove reportedly recalls Stephen “Stig” Abell, who was installed by NewsCorp as editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 2016, when Riley’s ex-husband was deputy editor. Riley has waved away the connection, but in any case Shove is a familiar type to anyone who has worked at a high-turnover media start-up whose clueless owners dreamed of disrupting the news business:
“There’s always money for nonsense,” as one of the Sequence staffers puts it. Putnam can’t stand Shove, and soon quits. As the months go by, however, whenever he and Laura meet up for drinks or dinner, the narrative around his departure changes: He insists he was pushed out. He has a bit of a midlife crisis, developing, in Laura’s words, an “insistent, cloying ruefulness,” a childish conviction that the world has treated him unfairly and that even his friends don’t understand.
Might it be that, in their insular literary world, they are protected to some extent from really grappling with the passage of time?
During Putnam’s exile from Sequence, his and Laura’s lives run gently parallel. Both their fathers pass away. They each inherit some money. They share vegetarian meals (Riley’s narrators are always vegetarian, but I don’t think that she’s marking them as wan little husks—to borrow a Joyce Carol Oatesism. The vegetarianism is certainly a marker of how these women have moved away from their upbringings, but the diet seems more practical than waifish. Though I cannot find any evidence to confirm that Riley herself is a vegetarian, militant or otherwise, I like to imagine the ubiquitous veg curries of her novels as a political commitment to normalizing plant-based eating. For his part, Putnam is a self-described “nineties vegetarian,” who finds textured vegetable protein perfectly delicious. “I’m not going to start faffing with aubergines at my age,” he says.
Putnam pushed out his lips for a second.“Mm…” he said.“’pparently,” he said.
The parents in all of Riley’s books, as well as the husband in First Love, are models of how not to age. They are by turns or in combination embarrassing, cruel, lonely, incompetent, unhealthy, absurd, and obdurate. 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. Laura, it would seem, has devised ways to avoid the fate of turning into your mother or marrying your father: Don’t have any kids yourself; stay healthy; stay solvent; if you must keep parental contact make the visits short and the phone calls dutiful; don’t wind up with someone you hate, or who hates you, out of fear of being alone. “It seemed an outlandish fate, to trail along behind my mother,” Laura says of her mother’s boyfriend, “ignored and despised.” At one point during his crisis Laura marvels that Putnam in his 49 years, most of them spent consuming literature and cinema, had not turned up “some model for elegant survival.” Laura, one assumes, thinks she has.
The parents in all of Riley’s books are models of how not to age. They are embarrassing, cruel, lonely, incompetent, unhealthy, absurd, and obdurate.Our parents’ ailments, physical and otherwise, so often seem a curse hurled at ourselves—think of Lenù’s mother’s bad hip in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (books that Bridget tries to get Hen to read in First Love). They take on mythic proportions; they make our suffering unique and all-important. The relative lightness of The Palm House comes from the way the burden of inheritance is generalized, and shared. There is Putnam and his father; there is Putnam and Laura’s friendship; there is the lively community around Sequence, which rallies to the publication’s defense. There is a jungle of potted ferns and monsteras and camellias cultivated on the patio of Putnam’s downstairs neighbor, his crush. She gets the pots off freegan sites. It’s a different sort of palm house. When the neighbor travels for work, she asks him to look after it. It won’t be hard, he says, they thrive on neglect. “But not total neglect,” he adds, “Not abandonment.”
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