My Phantoms
I like reading about visual artists and their work and how capturing those elusive things like “light” and “shade” might be what makes a work…work. And how the work of a truly skilled person differs so greatly from the caricature-ish work of, well, me — or a child who reaches for a crayon to draw a house with a pitched roof, four windows, and curlicued smoke coming out of the chimney. What the non-artists among us put to paper might be how we see and interpret an object, but when set against the actual setting, the disconnect is clear.
Because what we see and then project isn’t necessarily what truly “is.”
So it goes (in my opinion) with fiction…nothing worse than obvious and exaggerated physical descriptions or dialogue in a novel. I don’t write fiction, but I often think about how difficult it must be to paint a picture of a situation or a person without resorting to “flaxen locks” or “almond-shaped eyes” or superfluous and intricate descriptions of an outfit when it doesn’t really tell the reader anything about the character’s motivations or disposition. And dialogue: You know it when you read it whether it rings true.
My Phantoms is the first novel I’ve read by Gwendoline Riley, and everything about it felt so real and tangible and insightful despite nothing being obvious. What is essentially a deep dive into a woman’s relationship with her aging mother kept me on the edge of my seat. (Not in a “thriller” kind of a way, more like in a “how is the author going to nonchalantly describe the mother next?” kind of way.) At turns subtly funny and also intensely sad, My Phantoms paints a picture of something real. Because it’s all these nuanced words blending together to create the equivalent of “light” and “shade” that makes the book art. Like, you know, an actual real life.
Totally exquisite.
(Also, tell me what other Gwendoline Riley books I should read! I’m kind of obsessed now. And also check out this beautiful New York Review Books edition. The cover image is a painting called ‘Up the Road and Pigeon Die’ by Jean Cooke.)
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