Thirtysomething blues

If ever there was a book for our uncaring, unsharing times, it is Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, in which Neve, a woman in her mid-thirties, struggles with a truly awful family and with the men in her life, while trying to make a career as a writer. That latter point might suggest some kind of
bildungsroman approach, but in fact the meat of First Love is in its rich character depictions, from which Riley teases out a series of painful but exquisitely comedic episodes.

Neve’s father is a crude, self-styled ‘socialist’, full of class resentment and personal bitterness, while her pretentious mother, now remarried to a condescending Sunday painter, is so utterly self-absorbed that she is blind to Neve’s difficulties, forever complaining about her own lot instead. Neve’s husband, Edwyn, while not entirely unsympathetic, appears to be one of those men who make lack of empathy a matter of principle, even a badge of honour (when Neve’s father dies, he says, ‘I don’t understand it… You’re an intelligent woman. Did you think he was going to live forever?’), while her occasional lover, an American rock musician named Michael, moves in and out of her life whenever it suits him and is not above stealing from her.

Yet, as awful as all this sounds, Riley makes acute comedy out of Neve’s predicament, in the tradition of Huxley’s more acerbic early work, or the Orwell of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, even as she flirts with, and ultimately sends up, the ‘chick-lit’ school of writing about single women and their relationships. With cool equanimity, she gives us excruciatingly sentimental exchanges in which Neve and Edwyn exchange babyish endearments, on the one hand, and breathtakingly callous betrayals by the people Neve needs most, on the other.