Capturing Everyday Beauty: an Interview with Gwendoline Riley

by JD Flood February 23, 2009

Gwendoline Riley's novels honour the small things. Cold Water (2002) and its successor Sick Notes (2004) tell the stories of Carmel and Esther respectively, as they live out their 'wilderness years' in Manchester. Drink, doomed love and dysfunction accompany passing friendships and casual jobs. Bleak and beautiful, Riley's stories are drawn from the ordinary, but wry observation and intelligently-developed characters prevent the books from ever seeming banal.

Riley's characters read Russian writers, and she quotes Dostoevsky in the preliminary pages of Sick Notes; an American accent lingers in both books. But has Riley been at all influenced by English writers? "I don't know what they're going on about," she says. "I like Alan Warner, though, and I just read a book of short stories by Ewan Morrison that I enjoyed, but then he's Scottish, too, and the stories were set in America."

As is Riley's new book, Joshua Spassky. But is this a conscious effort to get away from writing about Manchester? Riley doesn't think so. In fact, although both of her novels are set in Manchester, she states that there are no particular places in the city that have influenced her writing. Nonetheless, a general sense of place pervades both books, and critics comment on it again and again. When asked if her portrayal of Manchester has changed between novels, she says: "In my new book I say 'every building drips with the thrush of failed love', and I imagine that was true for the first two books too."

Emotion and surroundings are intertwined for Riley's characters. Their habitat is observed with the same keen eye for detail that examines them, and a hundred tiny moments expand to fill the pages of each novel with a tribute to the everyday, to the way we live out our lives. The thoughtful prose produces a kind of poetic realism. Riley's anti-heroines are flawed or stagnating, but they are always sympathetically described and touchingly human; a combination of banter and self-reproach softens their hard edges. Hers is a rare brand of existentialism that makes room for both humour and warmth.

Riley's youth and style have often been drawn into journalistic comment on her work. When asked about her reaction to this sort of attention, her response is mixed. She thinks that the idea of herself as a 'hip lit' icon is ridiculous: "[Hip lit] was coined by that one article [in The Times Online], it hasn't been splashed across Time Magazine, and clearly it doesn't exist." But: "'Camus in hotpants' [3am Magazine] is a genius bit of description, I'm hardly going to be a churl about that." And perhaps it would be churlish to take offence at any comparison to Camus, hot-panted or not.

Several times during the Albion interview Riley responds tersely: if the answer to a question is a simple no, she doesn't shy away from saying so. Along with Carmel and Esther, she seems to refuse meaningless niceties. This is central to her work, giving it its integrity. The books and writing always take precedence over her public image: "I still work in a bar. I don't think it's unusual for writers to have other jobs. I'm just living my life."

Riley is serious about books and about becoming a more proficient writer. She reads widely: "I just read Everyman, Philip Roth, and I enjoyed it so much. Roth is definitely right on the edge of writing a Karamazov. I'm thinking about death more and more and Everyman confirmed what I've been thinking. One of my favourite books of all time is My Life as a Man. I think it's pretty holy, in its own way. I'm also reading Alan Warner's new one, and the Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories, which I've followed up on, and so I'm reading Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales. It's like being kicked in the stomach. And as to writing, I just finished my third novel, called Joshua Spassky, which is also about death and love, and is set in Asheville, North Carolina, where I went and stayed for a while last year."

When asked about her development as an author (her first novel was published when she was just twenty-two), Riley says, "I don't think many people are good writers at age seventeen, are they? Unless they're Rimbaud or Mary Shelley. I kept working on it. I wanted everything I wrote to be as good and to have as much integrity as The Great Gatsby or The Brothers Karamazov, but that couldn't be in my mind as I wrote, clearly. So I was just developing my brain's calibration, and following my instincts, and soon I knew I was good enough to begin, but that was only the beginning. I have to keep thinking all the time, and addressing certain questions, and investigating certain situations; I have to keep my mind in shape and be open to the world."

Gwendoline Riley's books are published by Jonathan Cape and Vintage