This fall, I devoured First Love by Gwendoline Riley, a novel that takes a fresh, slantwise approach to several themes dominating literature these days: dysfunctional relationships, gendered power dynamics, obsessive love. But this book is so much stranger and spikier than most novels of its kind; reviewers have aptly compared the scene-writing to Chekhov’s and the almost dada dialogue to Beckett’s. I kept thinking of early Deborah Eisenberg: another piercing, offbeat conjurer of difficult romances.
First Love narrates the volatile relationship between the narrator, Neve, and her boyfriend, Edwyn, with whom she shares an apartment. The two have blowout fights during which Edwyn spews abuse at Neve, repeatedly rehashing one night, years earlier, when she drank herself sick. “Get back in the sewer, scum,” he tells her more than once. (The narration, which bounces around in time, mirrors the disordered, iterative quality of their arguments.) In the U.S., the book was released on the same day as Riley’s next novel, My Phantoms, which orbits a vexed relationship between a mother and a daughter, and is easily the more devastating and technically superior of the two books.
Yet First Love’s exploration of loving someone with an illness (Edwyn has heart trouble that requires an operation and severe fibromyalgia that often flares in his hands) moved and engrossed me. Illness, of course, complicates our notions of culpability, agency, forgiveness; it undermines the illusion of individual will. Few books probe this subject as unsentimentally as First Love, and fewer still are made of sentences so inimitable and alive.
The Gwendoline Riley recommendation came from my friend, the poet Rachel Mannheimer, whose mind I have followed avidly since we were MFA students together at NYU. Mannheimer’s own debut came out in April, the first publication from visionary publisher Changes Press—and though I’d known her work for several years already, I emerged from the book astonished and dazed. Earth Room is a book-length poem that follows the speaker on her travels, mostly around America and Germany, and through her encounters with conceptual art.
But Earth Room’s brilliance lies, at least in part, in what it elides. Mannheimer is a genius of omission and suggestion, inviting her reader to arrive at the book’s insights—about partnership, daughterhood, colonialism, and the connections between art and life—inductively, alongside the poet herself. This is something of a pointillist poetry, composed of precise and plainspoken images that take on a larger shape when you step back from the canvas—or, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, when you look down at them from space. I found myself nodding (and then laughing) at the way her cool observations often double as winking jokes: “There were signs for the Church / of the Big Hole;” “Then we drove across the country. / I can tell you, geese are everywhere.”
Between these books was a long, hot summer, a highlight of which was Sarah Thankam Mathews’s glorious debut novel All This Could Be Different (later shortlisted for the National Book Award). ATCBD tells the story of Sneha, a queer Indian immigrant who has just graduated college in the mid-2000s American Midwest, with a menial corporate job and no family close at hand. Her life is beset by various kinds of precarity: her boss stops paying her; her racist landlord won’t heat her apartment; and distance—both geographic and metaphysical—strains even her closest relationships. Among the many pleasures of this exquisitely rendered bildung was the thrill of watching Sneha’s sexual desire overflow the borders she has resolutely drawn around herself, propelling her, despite her own best efforts, toward intimacy, recognition, and surrender. I loved watching as her lust for another woman changed from a sublimated gnawing to a headlong, even violent compulsion: to “devour” the beloved; to “ruin” her; to “go insane.” Sex, here, is a microcosm of self; it is one thread of the larger instinct—toward love, communion, and self-revelation—that will ultimately save Sneha’s life.
A few other books I read this year and unreservedly recommend: Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe; or, on being the other woman by Simone White; The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan; Our Red Book, edited by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff; Either/Or by Elif Batuman; and Panics by Barbara Molinard, in Emma Ramadan’s barbed, immaculate English translation.
