MY PHANTOMS

Short and sour (and grimly comic), this is a portrait of toxic parents, the mother in particular, as narrated by their daughter, a woman inevitably shaped by lifelong proximity to manipulative elders.

In her seventh book, noted British writer Riley once again applies her meticulous method to intimate relationships, working with pinpoint precise dialogue and close focus to convey an immersive, intense sense of character (generally flawed). In this new book, the territory is a family foursome: father Lee Grant, his wife, Helen, and their two daughters, Michelle and Bridget. Bridget narrates, dwelling first on weekends spent with her father, whom Helen left after seven years of marriage. A vainglorious, unpleasant bully—mocking, cruel, infantile—Lee is a father whose presence is at best to be endured, as both girls learn. Helen’s self-absorption is based on a different, less boastful, but equally problematic presentation: a kind of indignant, disappointed expectation that life has not delivered the normality she deserved. Her exhausting world of self-delusion is sad and false, and adult Bridget makes it her business to stay away from it. But the novel’s larger part is devoted to interactions between Helen and Bridget, at dreadful annual meals and then a longer visit Bridget must make to her mother’s apartment while Helen recuperates from an operation. Constant humoring is Bridget’s preferred mode, interspersed with occasional teasing, hedged in by high barriers, like never introducing her mother to her flat or her live-in boyfriend. “Do you want me to tell you why, Mum? Why I have to keep things separate? How many sentences do you think you can take on that subject?” This unspeakable, unbreakable connection continues even as circumstances change and worsen, and Riley tracks matters to their quietly lacerating conclusion.

A supremely discomfiting parent-child horror story delivered in pointillist style.