Gwendoline Riley's characters have a habit of speaking, and then speaking some more, as if they can't stop until they've emptied themselves out. In The Palm House, there's plenty to talk about: potential lovers, TV shows, terrible CEOs, the housing market. Yet all the conversational back-and-forth is just churn atop deep waters; everyone acts as if they're in a painfully unfunny sit-com, but all the gab conceals true trauma that always lies just beneath.
Kicking off with the apocalyptic (a sandstorm swirling about the Thames) and the humdrum (an anecdote about an annoying school chum who's never mentioned again), the book cements its approach from the start: catastrophes only noted or mentioned in passing while small talk dominates. But for Putnam, a jaundiced editor who's just quit his magazine job due to an obnoxious wanker of a new boss, small talk is as crucial as breathing, his way of railing against an uncaring universe. His prime confidante is fellow writer Laura, who somehow endures his ravings with only a twinge of irritation. Both middle-aged and dealing with their own shortcomings, Laura and Putnam are forever marveling at how others can sail through life, even as they hoard their miseries. As Laura puts it when describing Putnam: "It was as if he were wearing this coffin and daring us all to say something about it."
It comes out that Putnam is bearing an actual coffin as well as a cross: his father has recently passed, but damned if he'll say anything about it. The same goes for Laura, who may be the book's narrator, but is none too forthcoming about her own traumas. Nonetheless, The Palm House opens up her memories for our perusal, her childhood and young adulthood relayed through fraught anecdotes that are doubly devastating in their understatement. Touching on the transcendent (an encounter with a palm reader in which she's cured of warts, as if by magic) and the ghastly (a liaison with a full-of-himself comedian that becomes a humiliating sexual and emotional violation), these passages are like stones skipping over water, catching us up to the present, and while they say much about where Laura has been, they reveal little about where she's going. And therein lies the point of The Palm House : the past may be present, but the present will do what it will, whether it's Laura having a fling with a self-infatuated actor or Putnam developing a crush on his neighbor and getting suckered into caring for her garden while she's out of town.
Less a story with a linear narrative than a collection of episodes and wry observations, The Palm House is near-skeletal in its telling, but Riley is deft with her characterizations, and her precise wit is never better — or more withering — when it comes to puncturing the pretensions of the blustery figures who barge through Laura's life and leave chaos in their wake, especially her mother, a cheerful ogre whose "annihilating flippancy" overwhelms everyone, including her own daughter. With friends, family and ex-lovers like these, it's a wonder that Laura can summon up the energy to carry on living, but she does, because what else can one do when fortunes rise and fade on a whim? While that might sound like a fatalistic sentiment, Riley mines it for droll grace, and with the sour comes the sweet, as Laura attends to Putnam and eases him past his troubles just by being present. Even bitter, cynical Putnam can't avoid genuine warmth forever; when he finally honors his late father by recalling a touching flirtation involving his father and a waitress, the moment pierces like a searchlight slicing through fog. And if middle age isn't all it could be ("Everyone cares just that little bit less about anything you say or do," sighs one of their friends), it doesn't mean Laura and Putnam aren't above small kindnesses: cleaning up a flat while being a houseguest, caring for a stray cat.
The Palm House finishes with Laura and Putnam in the throes of change, perhaps even for the better, and yet the small talk continues: scuttlebutt about absent friends and enemies, fragments about other people's lives. Even in these small asides we divine whole lives upended and reformulated on the fly, where even the unworthy deserve a moment, just a moment, of attention. For all of The Palm House's acidity, this smidgen of generosity supplies a thoughtful aftertaste.