First Love

Neve, a novelist in her 30s, is married to Edwyn, an older man and classic emotional abuser. This short novel, almost a novella, explores the nature of their relationship, as well as her relationships with the other significant people in her life: her mother, her father, and her occasional lover, Michael.

First Love is the final book on the Orange Prize shortlist, and it took me a long time, months, to get to it. I came to this novel off a two-week Jacqueline Carey binge, a fantasy series featuring a race of sex-obsessed angel descendants in medieval France; those novels were 900 pages each, and they took me roughly the same amount of time to read as First Love, which clocks in at 122 pages and 3 days of dreading picking up my Kindle.

Don’t mistake me. This novel is, at times, achingly beautiful. It mostly takes the form of short scenes showing Neve interacting with one other person, and the dialogue is utterly perfect. It would be a good novel to adapt as a play (one that would be painful to watch): everything you need to know about the characters is right there in their conversations. Neve’s mother is a case in point. Married to an abusive man for years, she has reacted by maintaining a front of performative cheerfulness, filling her life with activities that she mistakes for leading a full life, but is utterly unable to make a human connection. Nothing in her dialogue is responsive to what has gone before; asked by her daughter how she is, she recites the schedule of her upcoming week. Neve, repeating her mother’s mistakes by marrying Edwyn, is acute enough to diagnose her mother as a human pinball, but not, seemingly, to benefit in any practical way from the cautionary tale that she represents. Edwyn, meanwhile, is a horrible man, engaging in classic abusive behaviours such as gaslighting and holding Neve’s financial dependence over her.

This wis not a novel of the kind I like to read. The subject-matter is intensely unpleasant, unrelentingly so. More to the point, there’s no movement to the plot at all: the protagonist’s position at the end of it is exactly the same. She might have had some ideas about her marriage, but seems unable to take any action. I know that kind of conclusion is powerful in its own way, but it’s also intensely frustrating, with the result that one of the key mercies of this novel is its brevity.