First Love

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.

Author Gwendoline Riley conjures some neat tricks in the Bailey's Prize nominated First Love: When we first meet our narrator Neve (a thirty-something, not-quite-successful novelist), she seems trapped in a suffocating relationship with her older husband, Edwyn – a peevish and needy man she may or may not stay with for the financial security – and I had to wonder at what forces keep this couple together; squirmed as Edwyn bullied and twisted Neve's words to use against her. But as the book progressed, Riley's deftly shifting timeline poses and then solves the small mysteries of such relationships in a series of satisfying clicks. I loved Neve's nearly clinical voice – as though the in-story novelist is creating character sketches as she tries to sort out her life – and while there isn't a traditional three act story arc, the action seems to happen in reverse: as though, here we are and this is how we got here. Everything about Riley's voice and technique worked for me (the dialogue is particularly natural and engaging), and while the overall effect wasn't as obvious as these extensive quotes might seem to demonstrate (it doesn't hit you over the head with, “Neve has Daddy issues so she married a controlling older man”), the keys to unlocking a life are all here. What else is fiction for? Spoilers ahead.

Ah, Edwyn. With his constant accusations and his disgust at being kissed on the mouth, you have to wonder why he stays with Neve; what could possibly be in it for him?

He'd wonder, haltingly, amazedly, at how he'd boxed himself in (ending up with me in his life, he meant), and when he did address me, it was abstractly, with strange conjectures, ruminations, about what I thought, who I was. “I know you hate anyone who didn't grow up on benefits,” he'd say, and if I objected, he'd take no notice, or didn't notice, he only continued, talking over me with mounting scorn: “I know you loathe anyone who didn't grow up in filth, on benefits.” I used to leave my body, in a way, while this went on. It was so incessant, his phrases so concatenated: there was no way in. These were thick, curtain walls. Edwyn has said since that he feels it's me trying to annihilate him. Strange business, isn't it?

And Neve: she seems intelligent and attractive; why does she debase herself in order to stay?

It continued to be frightening, panic-making, to hear the low pleading sounds I'd started making, whenever he was sharp with me. This wasn't how I spoke. (Except it was.) This wasn't me, this crawling, cautious creature. (Except it was.) I defaulted to it very easily. And he let me. Why? I wonder how much he even noticed, hopped up as he was. No, I don't believe he did notice. That was the lesson, I think. That none of this was personal.

We learn that Neve's father was physically abusive to her mother, and eventually, she escaped with the kids – yet, in order to keep some kind of peace, Neve and her brother were sent to him for weekend visits. While the father may not have been physical with his children, he did engage in a kind of passive-aggressive abuse with them:

It was his whetted look, I found, that I remembered most vividly. His stout expectation. How had that endured: life, knocks? But it had. He was “Just a big kid, really,” Christine said. Well, quite. Somehow he was. A greedy child. A tyrant child. And for fifteen years, every Saturday, my brother and I were laid on service to him. To listen to him. To be frightened by him, should he feel like it. As a child with his toys, he exercised a capricious rule, and as with any little imperator, his rage was hellish when his schemes were not reverenced. One wrong word unlatched a sort of chaos. The look in his eyes then! Licensed hatred. The keenest hunger.

And Neve's mother: eventually married to another uncaring man (an artist who belittles her opinions), Neve doesn't seem to recognise herself in her mother's pitiable life:

My mother wasn't quite sitting with them, though, but on a low stool a few feet behind Rodger. She wore a familiar expression: too eager, half-sly, while no one spoke to her, or looked at her. She held her empty half-pint glass up by her chin, and grinned hopelessly...It must be a dreadful cross: this hot desire to join in with people who don't want you. The need to burrow in.

So while it seems like you can draw a straight line between Neve's family influences and the life that she eventually lives, later information is revealed that refocusses what we've learned: just why does Neve stay with a man who accuses her of “filthiness”?

Was anybody clean back then? When I think of my friends' houses, they weren't any less filled with shit. Here were cold, cluttered bedrooms, greased sheets. The kitchens were a horror show: ceilings bejewelled with pus-coloured animal fat, washing-up sitting in water which was spangled like phlegm. Our neighbour's house, where we went after school, was an airlocked chamber smelling of bins that hadn't been put out. There was a long skid-mark, I remember, on one of the towels in their bathroom. It was there for three years. So – I did grow up in shit. It was no slander. Shit, filth, stupidity, dishonesty. (Mother looking up slyly from a crying jag.)

And why is Edwyn – literally disgusted by his wife and refusing to be her “carer” – sticking around? Turns out he has some family issues of his own:

Old ladies do just stop bothering, I'm afraid. No husband anymore, no kids, they just decide to live in filth. Stop cleaning the house, stop keeping themselves clean. Or feeding themselves properly. My mother was the same. She'd just eat white bread and jam, unless I went round and cooked for her. So she held that over me. And she started drinking, of course. She could get out to go to the pub all right, with her mad neighbour. Christ, I hated him. Always appearing over the fence. I mean, she made me hate her, really. She made me despise her. Isn't that dreadful? What did she want, really? A bit of attention.

First Love ends on a pleasant domestic scene – just an ordinary couple walking together through the park on the way to work – and it makes you realise that while Neve is concentrating on the negatives in her ruminations (and they are terrible negatives), there must have been many such pleasant scenes along the way (it is notable that nothing is said of Edwyn and Neve's early courtship days; they must have canoodled at some point) and it all just clicks together. Much heftier than its brevity might suggest, I loved what Riley created here.

So, last week I alluded to my father "yelling at his grandkids for seemingly no reason" while they were down visiting this summer, and I think that expanding on that might go some ways to explaining why I clicked with this book.

As the briefest of backstory (the whole is more complex than this), my nephew Conor is nearly 15, and with some learning/behavioural issues, he (though the sweetest of kids) has trouble making friends. Conor has always been fascinated by large machinery, and as my Dad has tractors and a Gator and a bush buggy, etc., and as Conor has always sought my Dad's approval, it was dangled in front of him this past school year that if he did well, he would be allowed to spend the summer down in the woods of Nova Scotia with his Pop and Nan. Conor did spectacularly well, and flew down within days of his last exam at school.

When Ken arrived a couple weeks later for his vacation, he had to tell our quick-tempered Dad several times to take it easier on the grandson who idolises him, and for reasons I will never quite understand, Ken still left Conor behind when he came back home. (Until this year when they drove down in their own car for potential quick escapes, I never allowed my girls to visit my parents without me. After the first year, I never again went down without my own car for potential quick escapes.)

Conor's mother, Laura, and sister got down there next, along with my other nephew and his Mom. One morning, Conor and Ethan decided to go fishing, and for bait, Conor grabbed a pepperette out of the fridge. Because there were only a few left in the package, Pop told Conor that he couldn't take any more to waste on bait. Fair enough. At some point Laura ran in to the grocery store, and when she got back, she let Conor know that she had bought four more packages of pepperettes if he needed them. Eventually Conor and Ethan went up to the house for lunch, and as they went to return to the lake, Conor grabbed another pepperette (assuming that Pop's order was based on scarcity). Dad saw this and lost it - jumping up from the couch, stomping over, grabbing the pepperette out of Conor's hand and throwing it in the sink, cursing at him (Goddamn it kid can't listen, blah blah), and when Conor went to explain himself, Dad shut him down and stormed away.

Conor and Ethan did go back to the lake for a while, and although Dad had told the boys only to fish off the dock, not out of the rowboat (for whatever reason), when Ethan went back up to the house for something, Conor laid out in the tied off boat and Ethan placed the fishing rods in with him, to keep them safe. My sisters-in-law Laura and Christine, as well as my niece, Ella, were all sitting on the veranda during the afternoon and were horrified at what happened next. Pop came out of the house, and seeing Conor in the boat with the fishing rods, he went stomping down the stairs, storming across the lawn, bellowing and cursing and telling Conor he never Goddamn listens. Through it all Conor was trying to protest, explain the situation, but he couldn't get in a word before Pop - his only living grandfather and the man that Conor idolises - told him to just "piss off". Dad then hopped into his bush buggy and went for a long ride with his dog. When Laura related this story to Ken later, he said that if that had happened while he was still there, he would have "pissed off" and taken Conor with him. When Ken later complained about this scene to our Mum, she said that she knew it wasn't fair on "poor old Conor", but it would only stir up trouble if she confronted Dad about it right then; she promised to talk to Dad after Conor left.

To bring it back to the book: Neve's father, the "tyrant child" with a "hellish rage", is my father. As scary as he is, Pop is a tantruming toddler. In a later scene, Neve explains that her father is unaccountably demeaning to workers in the service industry; as is my Dad. Ken said that he went to the grocery store with our father this summer and when the young male cashier asked, "Do you need a bag, Buddy?" (which is the friendly and colloquial way they talk down there; the place where my father is from), Dad lost it, saying, "Listen here, sport. I ain't your buddy and you will get nowhere in life talking to a seventy-year-old man like that." (To hear Ken tell it, this was an embarrassingly nasty scene even if I can't capture it with words.) And Neve's mother - the woman who literally runs away from her abuser only to send her children back into the fire weekly - is just like my own mother; an enabler and explainer. This was all just so familiar. And therefore particularly engaging for me personally, I reckon.