An Eastern Cape giant cycad in the Palm House at Kew Gardens in London is over 240 years old. It has lived most of its two centuries, since it was first transported by ship from South Africa, in a container, making it, according to the Kew Gardens website, “the oldest pot plant in the world.” A backhanded distinction, maybe, for a cycad, a type of plant that has been around for 250 million years; still, this specimen has made the best of its confines, curling toward the ribbed dome of the enormous greenhouse, propped up on crutches “like some senior citizens,” the website tactfully notes.
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.
Riley is wonderful with a metaphor, and often funny too: “a dark yellow sky—like iodine,” a washed-up writer’s prose like “a tip-toeing cartoon burglar,” someone peering at their phone “as if it were a dowsing rod.” She can condense character in a single gesture: a man who “haul[s] his shoulders back, like a precocious little ice skater, zooming to a halt before a camera.” She telegraphs themes in a few words’ worth of dialogue, which often goes on, not in alternating quips or monologues but in broken-up bits—not he said, she said, but he said, he said, he said, she said, she said, she said. The characters tell on themselves. Vignettes are juxtaposed; the bones of a life are present, not all the connective tissue.
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.
“In all of my books so far,” Riley said in a 2017 interview, “there is a woman looking at her life and asking, ‘How did I get here? Why are things the way they are?’ with varying degrees of panic.” In that same interview Riley also said she was trying to break from this pattern in her work, while at the same time wondering, did she have to? If it ain’t broke, fixate. And yet, the aperture is slightly wider here than one woman’s Talking Heads moment. The Palm House feels more thickly peopled, the narrator’s inner life more porous. The central focus is a friendship—in setting her narrator in front of a mirror showing something other than her parents, Riley refracts her very personal preoccupations. The effect is less disturbing than First Love and My Phantoms; this new book is less acute, perhaps less substantial, but I found myself more moved by the narrator precisely because her importance is somewhat displaced.
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:
He called Putnam “Ed”; Katherine “Kath”; he called Vik “the Prof.” When Vik grew a beard he shouted, “Great beard, Prof!” “Has everyone seen the Prof’s beard?” “Hey, are you a hipster now?” he shouted. “Hey, Prof, do you have a beard regime?” he shouted. “Do you use beard oil?” … Shove did not stop bellowing. About the news, about celebrities; he’d shout about exchanges he was following on Twitter. He could not be quiet. He could not sit still. In fact he would literally travel around the room on his chair, propelling himself from desk to desk, as if the room were a screen and he himself a restive cursor.
“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.
Between the palace intrigue at Sequence we get, in typical Riley mode, memoiristic snatches of Laura’s life: a holiday to Dubrovnik with her mother and grandmother, in which the trio buys maids’ shoes, thinking them chic; her teenage stint as a groupie for a comedian, which culminates in a sordid sexual assault; her relationship with an actor “so actorly, he seemed at times to be acting the part of an actor”; her day job at a history magazine that “every other month … seemed to run a piece headlined REVEALED: NEW SECRETS OF HITLER’S BUNKER”; a portrait of the last roommate she hopes ever to have. The awful father’s appearance is blessedly brief; the mother character is still embarrassing and unsympathetic but this time she’s not quite so pathetic. After retirement she takes up Spanish, which “she speaks as if summoning dark forces; the language seems to entail for her an element of torque. Soy vegana, she might say, warningly, y trabajo en una revista de cine!” When a boyfriend leaves her, the mother goes back to the same resort in Spain they’d visited together. A waiter recognizes her, asks after the boyfriend. “I just said he’d died,” she said, “then asked for some, I don’t know, patatas bravas.”
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.
Laura and Putnam still like to drink. As they do, they reflect on how London has changed, on the habits and ambition of those slightly younger than themselves (“gingerly sipping a half, if they come to the pub at all”; “she said it would just be, quote, a great way to skip mid-career, unquote … we wouldn’t have dreamt …”). Putnam’s periodic despondency aside, for the most part he and Laura are united in an outlook more quizzical than bitter. Might it be that, in their insular literary world, they are protected to some extent from really grappling with the passage of time? Even being fired from a legacy arts publication in London in the mid-2010s means you’ve been living in a hothouse. Nostalgia permeates the drama, along with, at times, “a peaceful sort of quiescence”—a phrase Laura uses to describe the effect that strange weather has on her, in an early vignette. Putnam acts out his pique by writing letters to the editor at the TLS and the FT, about historiography. “Are you really unhappy?” Laura asks him, at the bar.
Putnam pushed out his lips for a second.“Mm…” he said.“’pparently,” he said.
It is significant that his sadness truly breaks through when they visit Putnam’s father’s favorite café. He’s brought to his father’s environment, and then he does despair: “The see-saw of life just tips, doesn’t it?” he says, “and then it is downhill all the way.” And yet, I think this is the happiest book of Riley’s that I’ve read. There is here a melancholic happiness, the kind that sets in after a solo drink on a pleasant afternoon, maybe, but there is contentment, nonetheless.
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.And yet, Riley knows we can’t forget the pot in which the palm has grown. Both Putnam’s and Laura’s financial independence comes from their fathers dying and leaving them some real estate: Laura’s odious father’s house, on which he’d done no upkeep, nets her enough for a studio apartment, while Putnam is embarrassed by what he gets for his father’s modest home in a neighborhood where through the windows he and Laura can spy new levels of suburban luxury—“huge paintings, and pianos, and vast TV screens.” “There’ll be a great big tank in the driveway before long. Then they’ll be digging out their double-decker sex dungeon,” he says. But it means he can wait out the reign of Shove. And Laura will not have to live with roommates again: “I was free,” she says, “I was lifted-up.” So, in the way of generations, the parents provide the conditions for escaping from them. Inheritance buys children freedom, by showing them how they do not wish to be. Freedom up to a point: The studio Laura buys is across the street from a house where her mother once lived. One of her mother’s ideas for occupying herself after retirement, besides the Spanish lessons, had been to go around to all the places she’d ever lived and take photos of how the blocks had changed. Much of The Palm House amounts to Laura’s own version of that project.
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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