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.
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