First Love

"A woman in her thirties called Neve is married to an older man called Edwyn; she’s a writer and so she studies her marriage, and Edwyn with the forensic eye of one. The marriage feels and sounds like an oppressive one, with both Neve and Edwyn made miserable in it. I grew to hate Edwyn who comes across as a needy and childish man despite his age, but I think we are supposed to feel both needled by what seems like his bullying of Neve, but also their tenderness towards toward each other, in spite of, or alongside, the oppressive elements of their intimacy. We only see things from her point of view and there are these tiny clues that Riley drops as to the ways in which Neve shuts Edwyn out, or torments him in her own way. The novels speaks so clearly, and so chillingly, about the hard edges of intimacy. It has some of the same inquiries into the meaning of love, the meaning of intimacy. Whether we always stay unknown or only half understood to our lovers or partners or husbands. Just like the others, this has a female protagonist who is also a writer at its heart, and a woman with the same kind of damaged family – a bullying father, an unreliable mother, and there is something deeply lonely about the central character, though it is made clear that she chooses to be alone, and prefers it that way. “The novels speaks so clearly, and so chillingly, about the hard edges of intimacy” So this book does a lot of the things that the previous ones do, but there is something magical that happens in this one, and I found it so much more beautiful, painful and powerful. It’s definitely her best book yet – poetic, spare, forensic and unforgiving in its observations, all at once. She does it through incident and dialogue very well in this book. Edwyn is shown as unreasonable through his words and his actions. Riley’s protagonists are always keen observers of other people and so Neve is here, recalling dialogue from years ago, making connections between her father’s behaviour and Edwyn’s. She’s an intelligent protagonist, and it’s all very psychological territory in her character portraits. Men on the whole have been distant and inaccessible in her books, and here, although I detested Edwyn, he is perhaps the one who reveals most about what is going on in his head. He is the most confessional and communicative, strangely."