Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House: A Portrait of Precarious Existence and Unfulfilled Longing

What will it take to be fulfilled by life? Love, perhaps, or community, power, or professional success. At different points in my life I believed that having my work published would make me happy, or leaving the country, going back to school, getting a literary agent. I thought a new girlfriend might do it, or a new apartment. Some of these I achieved; some I’ve yet to; one or two, thankfully, are long behind me. And you know what? They did, at one point or another, satisfy me. Yet there has always been another waypoint, another goalpost, somewhere further along the way.

I think this is why I have always connected with the fiction of Gwendoline Riley. A keen chronicler of existential disappointment, the English novelist populates books like My Phantoms and Cold Water with those who sense that they have been stymied by life, cast away by shifting currents of both capital and culture, yet who do not, even cannot, allow themselves to acknowledge the fact.

Riley’s Marginalized Narrators and the Illusion of Progress

Her narrators are marginal women, hacking away in the crevices of the publishing and culture industries, or downwardly mobilized—back to working service jobs in North England hometowns. Their mothers are self-confident to a suspicious extreme, blundering through retirement with a stage grin and a deep well of contempt for the people around them. Meanwhile, the men in their lives—lovers, bosses, and the occasional absent father—have a bad habit of lashing out, inflicting their failed vision onto a world too superficial to accept it.

The Palm House: A Story of Precarious Existence in the Late 2010s

In The Palm House, newly published by The New York Review of Books, this narrator is a writer named Laura, a freelancer bouncing around from support job to support job, and occasionally contributing to a highbrow intellectual magazine called Sequence. Unfortunately it is the late 2010s, Brexit has just slipped through, and the magazine’s parent company have appointed a new editor-in-chief at Sequence, a Will Lewis-type near-illiterate with vague ideas and powerful friends, a grown man who insists that everyone call him “Shove.”

In his goal to turn the publication into “a sort of London version of the New Yorker,” he is pushing out Edmund Putnam, a high-ranking editor who gave Laura her first entrée into journalism, and a man for whom Sequence has been virtually his entire adult life. Putnam’s future, Laura’s future, the future of media and writing and perhaps even thought as a going concern: all seems suddenly up in the air.

Yet this crisis is only the initial spark of Riley’s idea. The Palm House is really the story of Laura’s precarious and sharply contingent life.

Laura’s Upbringing: Silence and Superficiality

Laura grew up in Liverpool, sharing a house with both her grandmother and mother. In this family, she recalls, there was “a terrific inhibition around substantive conversation,” and all forms of talk reverted ultimately to pat phrases and ready-made cliches. Her grandmother flips through “gadget catalogues” while her mother goes on and on in a strange and unplaceable foreign accent probably picked up from TV. Neither needs much input from