First Love by Gwendoline Riley
Not a love story
The name Gwendoline really threw me off the scent. I pictured an older writer of a different generation, somewhat austere or Victorian perhaps. But in fact Gwendoline Riley is of my generation and writing contemporary fiction, although there is something distant about her work, as if it is set in no time. In First Love, the central character is Neve, a Scottish writer in her 30s, and one half of a nasty, complicated marriage. What I liked and admired about the novel was its restraint and its unapologetic gaps. The prose is bare and stripped and hurtful. There is a refusal to pick a central theme or narrative. Everything just is; yet as in life, there is depth in nothing happening. And then, every so often a sentence would jump out at me that held such truth and tenderness that it felt like glimpsing a little bird in a barren winter tree.
“Considering one’s life requires a horribly delicate determination, doesn’t it? To get to the truth, to the heart of the trouble. You wake and your dreams disband in a mid-brain void. At the sink, in the street, other shadows crowd in: dim thugs (they are everywhere) who’d like you never to work anything out.”
Riley is bracingly unsentimental but she is not merciless. There is wit in her character studies, if not warmth. Her unconcern for tidying the loose ends of life speaks of a certain courage. First Love won’t be for all readers, but its frankness will be a balm for a select few.