First Love, by Gwendoline Riley

I think I originally picked up First Love on the basis of a recommendation for another Gwendoline Riley novel. I heard something good about her and it was the book that was immediately available and so I got it. And then it sat on my shelf for several years. It was similarly a recommendation of a different novel of hers (The Palm House, which came out earlier this year) that inspired me to pull it out and read it in a few sittings yesterday. As it turned out, it was a more apt selection than I even realized. I hadn't previously been aware Riley was from the north of England. I was fresh back from a trip to Manchester and London, so I could just picture – fresh in my mind – many of the locations in the book: Oxford Road or Oldham Street in Manchester; the new developments in Ancoats where the narrator's mother lives; Earl's Court or Euston in London. 

Let me start by saying that I liked First Love. And yet, a few paragraphs in, one of the first thoughts I had while reading it (even as I was already aware that I was enjoying the prose at least) was about how boring I find heterosexual relationships to be. I think coming into this right after reading Hotel du Lac, which is quite different but also very much about heterosexual relationships and power dynamics, is what emphasized the point for me. I don't know that I would have thought independently that these books had much in common, but they are both about (among other things) the ways women sometimes make themselves small in relationships, orbiting the man who remains the center. 

The back cover blurb for First Love says,  

Catastrophically ill-suited for each other, and forever straddling a line between relative calm and explosive confrontation, Neve and her husband, Edwyn, live together in London... Drawing us into the battleground of this marriage, Gwendoline Riley tells a transfixing story of mistakes and misalliances, of helplessness and hostility, in which both husband and wife have played a part. 

It goes on to ask, coyly: "Could this possibly be, nonetheless, a story of love?" And that question, well – it just seems so beside the point to me. The question posed on the back of the book is not, I think, one anyone would be asking if not for the title of the book. The title does make one wonder, of course. What first love are we talking about here? Is it ironic? I suppose this is a mild spoiler, but the conditions of the relationship at the center of this book are so bad, I hardly think it matters if it's love. In any case, this is an issue I take not with the book but with whoever wrote the back cover text, so I guess I should let it go. The book was quite good at exploring this relationship.