Daughters Outgrow Parents in Two Unsparing Novels

I thought often of Garner’s essay while reading two short, savage novels by the English writer Gwendoline Riley, “First Love” and “My Phantoms,” both published by New York Review Books. I don’t recall reading many novels as grotesquely honest about the original sin of being born to inadequate parents. Riley has Garner’s quick eye for detail but replaces her anguished charity with vengeful clarity. Both of her novels have the unguarded nudity of correspondence; they have no time for the diplomatic niceties, the aesthetic throat-clearing of most literary fiction. The two novels relate to each other like twitching limbs from the same violated torso.