One of the recurring puzzles of Gwendoline Riley’s novels is why her protagonists, acerbic but measured women, find themselves, again and again, in relationships with men devoid of charm and capable of wicked cruelty. Or to put it another way, why do the oafish, careless and stupid have so much power over the lives of otherwise sensitive and thoughtful people? Like several of its predecessors, The Palm House is narrated by a woman who, through a series of recollections of her upbringing and musings on her current life, seems to be trying to understand the oppressive force that mediocrity can exert. 

The novel is partly concerned with the decision of Edmund Putnam, a friend of the narrator, Laura, to leave his job at a magazine after twenty-five years. Sequence, in common with its model, the Times Literary Supplement, has offices near London Bridge. Its board has also ill-advisedly hired a ‘company man’ to take over the editorship. Like Stephen ‘Stig’ Abell, who moved to the TLS from the bosom-forward Sun in 2016, Riley’s fictional Simon Halfpenny also goes by a monosyllabic nickname. ‘Shove’, as he insists on being called, has plans to turn Sequence into the New Yorker, despite the fact that, as Putnam bemoans, there is already a New Yorker, not to mention countless other publications committed to serving up ‘approachable’ writing to the masses. The novel’s title alludes to the tall Victorian glasshouse in Kew Gardens where Laura promises to go with Putnam and his father. Riley’s suggestion is that the refined, insular world of literary magazines in which beautiful things can grow because they are cut off from the outside is its own kind of conservatory. 

Ostensibly, it is in response to Sequence’s middlebrow turn that Putnam – or Ed, as Shove calls him – decides to leave. But Putnam pleads his case too emphatically for it to be convincing: Shove allows him to get on with his job; Putnam need only tolerate the occasional dross his new boss insists on printing. The real crisis, which has Putnam breaking out in stress-induced eczema, is that his father is dying. Against this backdrop, Shove’s crass overfamiliarity is one straw too many. 

The job clearly symbolises more than just income and social status for Putnam: he was treated as a second son by a previous editor and his father, Martin, used to contribute to the magazine. Even so, Laura doesn’t believe that having a dim, entitled and insensitive boss is sufficient to justify the kind of depressive spiral into which Putnam sinks. She finds it ‘mind-bending’ that Putnam proves so ill-equipped to shrug off Shove’s antics, to tend his little garden and find pleasure in the world available to him. (‘Putnam was forty-nine!’)

That Putnam deals so indecorously with hardships runs against Laura’s worldview, which equates moral virtue with aesthetic refinement. Surely all those years spent ‘reading, thinking, watching films’ have given him ‘an inkling of how to face life? Some model for elegant survival?’ Perhaps, she considers, she is dealing with ‘a sort of bovarism’: a state of escapist fantasy, an intoxication with fiction unaccompanied by the learning of any worthwhile lessons.

The novel’s other strand describes a different kind of intoxication, one fuelled by naivety and boredom. Laura, aged fifteen, sends tape recordings of herself talking about banal features of her teenage life to a 29-year-old stand-up comedian named Chris Patrick, whose jokes are about how miserable and sensitive he is, and whose audience mainly comprises teenage girls – a fact that he claims to resent. ‘Did it really hurt his vanity, that girls went to see him?’ Laura asks. ‘Or was his dismay part of the bit?’ 

Anna, a girl four years Laura’s senior, acts as an accomplice in a plan to befriend Chris, although both are naive about what this might entail. Riley’s prose sparkles with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth in these passages. She manages to keep her reader one step ahead of the adventurous pair – a bit more knowing, a bit more alive to danger. 

Laura ends up in Chris’s flat in London, naked and hearing the word ‘labia’ for the first time. Walking her to the station afterwards, he tells her: ‘The best thing is to do it with someone you’re in love with … then it’s ’mazing.’ He also offers her some practical advice: ‘You’ll probably get a bit of thrush tomorrow … you can get cream for that at Boots.’ This is a typical Riley episode: wry and aware of the savage cruelty of experience.

But how do these threads – a workplace drama and a story of what might charitably be called romantic failure – fit together? Riley’s novel can be read as parallel narratives of trauma and the ways we avoid confronting it – catastrophising about a professional setback or putting oneself at the mercy of an older man. Or we might understand The Palm House as an extended analogy between the hollowness of cultish institutions such as Sequence and the pathetic nature of a small-town comedian: both overestimate their own importance. But Riley doesn’t make the connections explicit. Instead, she offers a series of often dazzlingly perceptive portraits, letting them sit side by side as fragments of information not yet processed.