The Gift of Words

MY SISTER AND I used to shake our presents on Christmas Eve, guessing at their contents. There are multiple reasons why we shouldn’t have been doing this, chief among them the fact that we’re Jewish. We shouldn’t have been observing Christmas at all (but you try separating my mother from a string of lights). So observing it we were, as if from afar. Christmas breakfast was bagels and lox. Christmas music was “The Big Chill” soundtrack, which got stuck in the living room CD player sometime in 1995 and remains there to this day. When it came to presents, my parents could not let go of the eight-day trail of socks and chocolates leading to an “actual” gift. They numbered the packages in the order they were meant to be opened on Christmas morning — which meant all our guessing was low stakes, as the answer was generally “soap.” Books were the only shape that did not fill our young hearts with the dreaded sense that we were shaking a pack of AA batteries.

Each year, the internet is flooded with gift guides for books — here are the 53 best novels, the 26 best coffee-table books, the 101 best autobiographies by dalmatians. The numbers are haphazardly astronomical because, why not? Books make ideal gifts. They’re impossible to screw up too badly, they fit neatly in a suitcase, and they’re rarely embarrassing to display on a shelf. Sadly, the good ones don’t make any noise when you shake them. So herewith, a selection of the season’s excellent but distinctly jingle-free books.

One can rarely go wrong in turning to The New York Review of Books for a good gift … or six. For me, these are the pair of dark, slim, recently published novels by British author Gwendoline Riley. “First Love” (NYRB) is told from the point of view of Neve, a London woman in her mid-30s married to Edwyn, an older and ailing man who is resentful of her in every way, as they attempt to navigate each other’s moods. This is an emotional landscape (read: battlefield) in which every plant has roots in the past. Novels with “memory” as their primary subject do not always signal “page-turner,” but Riley’s writing is equal parts charm and weight, social and moral observation. “We walked up to the shops, into the throat of the wind. People were moving slowly, obstructively, in both directions: only these little tiptoe scutters when a gust caught them: arms lifted, bags.” The reader is transported into the tensions of a delicate relationship. (“I blame myself,” says Edwyn in a particularly graceless rant. “I knew what I was getting. I knew what you were.”) Riley writes like Brâncuși sculpts, letting precise lines of description do the heavy lifting.

This quality is also on display in Riley’s “My Phantoms” (NYRB), a book as beguiling as “First Love” but twice as devastating. The mother in this haunting novel injects herself in conversations “as if she were trying to jump onto a moving carousel” while her daughter kicks and screams against the artifice of their strained relationship, which only deepens their respective isolation.

Both novels are stunners, fitting introductions of an acclaimed writer to an American audience, and both are worth the price of admission for the dialogue alone — though perhaps neither are meant to be given with a card that reads “saw this and thought of you.”