Rachel Cusk

An overview and a review of Second Place

Rachel Cusk: Second Place

Faber and Faber £14.99

Rachel Cusk is one of my favourite writers, but I would feel nervous about knowing her in real life. It’s not that she’s cruel - just beadily perceptive, swiftly seeing through the social niceties many of us use as facades. She is such a funny writer: her takedowns are usually of pompous people, and she does it in such a light-fingered way that it’s like the character assassination equivalent of enough Novickok on your door knob to make you lose control of your sphincters while remaining well enough to see people pointing.

I’ve loved Cusk’s writing since her debut, Saving Agnes, published in 1993, won the Whitbread First Novel award. Here was a woman who was so  insightful that she could dissect the social dance we all lead and articulate it concisely and sharply, leaving you re-reading the sentence to see if she had really just captured that perception so perfectly, or if that sly adjective (‘painted’ being one that she uses often for women wearing too much make-up) was really as bitchy as it seemed. 

And I hoovered her up. She’s one of those writers I am driven to read. Her fiction also featured women at the same stage of life as I was, because we are similar ages, and it was a joy to see the self doubt, anxieties, rewards, and interactions of life, the workplace, friendship, and the courting dance reflected with such savage wit. 

 Cusk’s characters were complex. They were neither goody-goodies or monsters but somewhere in between; secular saints who sinned and didn’t flagellate themselves with remorse. They refused to live up to societal norms of acceptable behaviour, and I would feel a thrilled frisson as they broke the rules.

Then Cusk had a baby and she dared to break the orthodoxy by writing a memoir about how it wasn’t all sweet-scented cherubs and a sense of earthly fulfilment. I must be honest here and say that as someone who has always longed to have babies and couldn’t because of chronic illness, I can’t completely relate to what Cusk wrote, but I can empathise and understand the feeling of being submerged by an endless routine of dull domestic chores. And even though I love babies, I find bathing a baby once exhausting, so what must it be like to do it and a thousand other tasks every day, all the while with the responsibility that if you turn your back, this perfect little person could come to harm. The stress is immense. And the surge of overwhelming love throbbing in your chest obviously can’t dissipate the fatigue. If you are a creative, not having the time or energy to do the work you love must be so frustrating, to the point of making you question who you are. 

But the response to A Life’s Work: On Becoming A Mother was shocking to Cusk. She has spoken in interviews of how she felt violated, as if her very suitability to motherhood was being questioned and being accused of barbaric acts ( https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/21/biography.women ). In fact, her imagined crimes were often just that - vengeful creations by critics furious that the mundane chores had been pointed out in sainted motherhood.

More novels followed, with some, such as 2006’s Arlington Park, again attracting sour comments because of their suggestion that there may be disquiet and mutiny in suburban family life. 

Then, in 2009, Cusk published The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy. This was a memoir of some weeks spent with her husband and children in Italy, looking at the art of masters such as Giotto and rubbing up against various ex-pat and Italian characters. Unfortunately, one of the former characters recognised himself in the book and sued for libel. So the remaining books in the UK were pulped, and the book was radically altered in the US.

But it is this very lack of compromise in depicting characters that makes Cusk so readable. Not for her the urge to temper any ugly traits in her characters with lovable ones. No, she simply depicts, sometimes brutally, but never with excess, people’s mannerisms and behaviour. And if they happen to be real people, then she feels no compulsion to censor or soften. 

She is like that with depictions of herself as well, of course, as was evident in her memoir about motherhood, and this searing honesty burnt through the pages of her memoir about divorce, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, which I reviewed favourably here for The Independent on Sunday: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/aftermath-marriage-and-separation-rachel-cusk-7554008.html

Yes, at times Cusk’s admissions seemed monstrously selfish, such as her instinctive wish to deny her husband shared custody of the children. But many critics seem to miss the point that most writers of memoir would never admit to base and selfish feelings. Most memoir is - to use a job interview analogy - of the ‘what’s my biggest fault? I’m very *conscientious* - eyelash flutter, coy smile’ school of self-portrayal. Here was someone - and a woman at that - because we all know that to a certain extent, society’s currency for women is selfless sweetness and kindness as well as soothing beauty - who showed the world not only her vulnerability and ferocious tigress love for her cubs, but the dark side of that. You knew that she would claw anyone who threatened her time with her children to ribbons. And people had suggested she was an uncaring mother.

Of course there was another inevitable furore. One that left Cusk quite bruised. But there was no returning to straight fiction for her, she had previously declared that she could go no further with fiction and that memoir was the way forward. Many readers including myself admired this stance. After all, how much more enthralling is it to read the warts and all accounts of real people you admire struggling with the same issues in life as us than to read yet another mediocre novel about two-dimensional fictional characters you don’t care about?

But memoir carried the risk of evisceration by savage critics or smouldering individuals she knew, and Cusk couldn’t put herself through this repeatedly. So she came across an ingenious method of keeping herself hidden while still hinting that the main female character might be partly based on herself. She embarked on a trilogy, which started with Outline in 2014, Transit in 2017, and finally Kudos in 2018.  The most startling fact about Outline was how invisible the protagonist, Faye, was. And yet she drew people to her, people who would unload themselves onto her, discussing everything from their private lives and ambitions to musings on life. Many enduring facts were elucidating during these monologues, including the differences between men and women, and the way some people are oblivious to the pain or existence of their interlocutor. I reviewed the book for The Independent on Sunday here:

 https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/outline-rachel-cusk-book-review-when-writers-get-talking-9833069.html

Transit provided more details of Faye’s life, but she was still invisible to some other characters in the book, whose thoughtlessness and even imposition suggested that they too saw her as a blank canvas on which to project their own desires. 

In Kudos, Faye seemed to express her own thoughts more, and the rarefied discussions atomised the conversation of the characters beyond the realm of the tangible into the metaphysical and philosophical. But despite the suspicion that it was unfeasible for every person to be so emotionally and intellectually intelligent and eloquent, the sheer, dizzying substance of the conversations - like talking about life and love with best friends - infused this reader with the same compulsion for more. Cusk’s prose is the kind you want to get drunk on, but unlike fellow addictively quaffable autofiction writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, there are no passages where you crease your nose and, with lack of conviction, think ‘hmmmm.’

There followed a collection of essays in 2019, Coventry, where Cusk continued to quietly drop her little atom bombs, such as the fact that when she was a child, her mother used to regularly send Cusk ‘to Coventry’, that is, withdraw completely from speaking to or even acknowledging her existence. This was so similar to the way my abusive mother would often pretend I didn’t exist and yawn loudly and theatrically (‘yaaaaa…aaaaaw…aaaaaw…aaaaw..aaaaw…awwwwnn’, with the repeated covering of the screeching open mouth accentuating the noise and my shame at being seen)  if I or my father said anything that I was astonished and longed to hug Cusk.

And now here is her latest novel, Second Place. Written in the form of a long letter to her friend, Jeffers, it is ostensibly about a woman writer who lives with her strong and silent husband Tony, who works the land, in a serene rural idyll surrounded by marshland. Years ago, this woman saw the art of a painter, known only as L, exhibited abroad, and the art made such an emotional connection with her that she knew she wanted to meet and get to know L.

Finally, she gets the opportunity to invite him to come and stay in their second place, a beautiful house a short walk from their own, which they have lovingly decorated to create a peaceful environment in which creatives can work.

Right from the start, there are harbingers of unease. L first accepts the invitation, but then, after the narrator and Tony spend days scrubbing and preparing the second place, basically lets them know he’s had a better offer.

Months later, when it’s really inconvenient, because the narrator’s daughter Justine and her boyfriend are staying in the second place, L contacts the narrator again to say that he can after all come. No question about is it convenient or would she rather he came at a different time. From the start he comes across as entitled and selfish. The narrator and her husband are instructed to go and fetch him. When they do, it turns out he has brought a female friend without asking them. The friend, Brett, is beautiful, and the narrator’s heart sinks. She experiences all the emotions we know to be jealousy, and at this point, as a reader, I wondered why I had not been given the whole story of why she wanted L to come and stay. There is a difference between admiring someone creatively and being obsessed about them, and our narrator seems firmly on the latter side. What is odd is that I have become accustomed to Cusk either dissecting characters’ motives to the bone, or else withholding vast amounts. It’s difficult to reconcile the narrator being so honest about her current feelings - her misery, her dependency on L’s goodwill - without having divulged the depths or reasons for her obsession.

It’s obvious that the narrator has been previously shattered - much as Cusk herself was - by an acrimonious divorce. So she is looking in someway for L to heal her, and as a creative, she is drawn to another artist. She knows that Tony’s solidity, strength, and reliability is good for her. But but but. And although she doesn’t talk about wanting a sexual relationship with L, she is struck to the core by his seeming repulsion of her in a way that can only suggest physical as well as creative/emotional reliance.

The book does not disappoint in terms of depth of emotional charge and analysis of feelings. In fact, the narrator seems to exist in a nervy thrall, constantly aware of L’s whereabouts and what he must think of her. And the wry, dry, observations and glorious bitchicisms (my neologism) are present, both in Brett, who skips about, ‘caringly’ pointing out the narrator’s damaged grey hair and who Justine seems to prefer to her mother, and in the egocentricity of L. But it’s difficult to sit back and enjoy this snark because the narrator is so tense, so looking for fulfilment through L, that the reader fears for her and for Tony, whose calm, stoical nature can only take so much.

It’s not until the end of the book that we are told that it is actually not a novel but based on a memoir, Lorenzo in Taos, written by Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1932, of when DH Lawrence came to stay with Luhan in Taos, New Mexico. L has been changed by Cusk from a writer to an artist.

Of course this knowledge floods the reader with a deluge of questions. How religiously does Cusk stick to Luhan’s memoir? According to another reviewer who has read the latter, to quite a large degree. And then more questions rise. How can the emotionally and intellectually inquisitive writer of the Outline trilogy create a protagonist who is intended to come across as fragile and sympathetic while allowing her to be so lacking in interest in others? When Justine tells her mother that Brett danced professionally to put herself through medical school, there is only rankling resentment, none of the curiosity you might expect, with questions about Brett’s life and work. Brett is portrayed as a cipher, a privileged little rich girl. But no one does medicine and dances professionally to put themselves through medical school if they want to be a dilettante. And why *is* L so vile to the narrator? Is it simply the contempt that a bully feels for a weakling who longs to please him? What does he mean in his bizarre, barbed comments to her?

I’m left sated by the characteristically delicious prose but hungering for answers about the narrator and other characters. I don’t know whether Luhan’s memoir leaves the reader similarly feeling they haven’t been told the whole story. Still, it wouldn’t be a Cusk if it didn’t leave you ravenous for more.

Leyla Sanai