Hermione Hoby at Bookforum:
GWENDOLINE RILEY, THE FEROCIOUSLY TALENTED forty-seven-year-old British novelist, is deeply and rightly admired—by younger female readers in particular—for a body of work that now comprises eight increasingly sophisticated novels, all of them short and lacerating. Riley’s oeuvre, in other words, has become an object of widespread readerly love even as her books themselves can seem scoured of fondness. Fandom has been around since the advent of mass media, but with that old world dying and the new one (bluntly summarized, its main features are social media plus the tyranny of the algorithm) very much born, now is the time of fangirls. And fangirling—loving a stranger madly and blindly—essentially means voluntarily replacing your own vision with a pair of heart-eye emojis. The guarded, intelligent, and relentlessly scrutinizing female narrators of Riley’s novels see through whatever the opposite of heart-eye emojis are; the astringent pleasure of her work comes from a sense that its author is vigilantly undeceived and would rather die than swoon over anyone or anything. In both the precision of its prose and in the sometimes cruel, often sordid human realities it depicts, a Gwendoline Riley novel is phobic of sentimentality. You can love Riley’s work, you can certainly admire it, but I don’t think you can fangirl over it.
more here.
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