You already know while you’re studying a web page of Rachel Cusk’s fiction. Her narrators tug insistently, if coolly, at the central knots of being. They analyse each emotion as if it had been freshly invented. Nothing is extraneous.
The marginally indifferent, hot-but-cold high quality of Cusk’s work is emphasised by her writer’s hanging use of the serifless roman typeface Optima, with extensive spacing between the strains. Optima is uncommon to see in a novel; it delivers to my eyes a chill sense of the void.
Cusk has employed Optima at least since the Define trilogy, the novels that made her title unignorable. It’s as distinctive, in its method, as The New Yorker’s Irvin font. I attempted utilizing it to sort this piece. It made me really feel I used to be engaged on Laurie Anderson’s laptop computer.
Second Place is Cusk’s first novel since the trilogy’s concluding e book, Kudos, in 2018. Admirers of the trilogy will really feel at house right here, maybe an excessive amount of so.
The narrator is acquainted: a sharply observant author in center age. The themes are related, too: artwork, literature, journey, destiny, homes, bodily magnificence and its perceived fading, and parenthood, described right here as “the closest most individuals get to a possibility for tyranny.”
However a lot is completely different. In contrast to the Define novels, Second Place tells a single story and takes place in a single family; it’s about a restricted set of characters. Extra notably, this e book has a swirling-hothouse high quality that’s new.
It’s as if Cusk has been studying Joyce Carol Oates’ greatest novels. She digs into the gothic core of household and romantic entanglements. I crammed the margins with test marks of admiration, but in addition with exclamation factors. This novel pushes its needles into the crimson.
The story is that this: M, a author who lives along with her second husband, Tony, on a distant piece of property, invitations L, a well-known youthful painter whose work she admires, to come back and keep of their “second place,” a cabin that’s an artist’s retreat of kinds, one they usually lend out.
“I would really like you to come back right here, to see what it seems like by your eyes,” M writes to L, describing the “conundrum” of the panorama to him. “It is stuffed with desolation and solace and thriller, and it hasn’t but informed its secret to anybody.”
That is most likely the place to pause and say that Cusk tells us, in a brief afterword, that her novel “owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time DH Lawrence got here to stick with her in Taos, New Mexico.”
You don’t have to have learn Luhan’s memoir (I hadn’t till this week) to take pleasure in Cusk’s novel. Luhan’s e book is a deal with, although, and deserves to be higher recognized. Lawrence was irritable and intense, as is the painter L in Cusk’s novel.
Each books are addressed to “Jeffers.” In Luhan’s case, this was her good friend, poet Robinson Jeffers. In Cusk’s novel, Jeffers’ id stays a thriller. Somebody might write a time period paper on the overlap between the books.
My favorite overlaps are humorous little ones. In Luhan’s e book, for instance, Frieda Lawrence, who visits along with her husband, has “a mouth quite like a gunman.” Cusk offers L’s girlfriend, Brett, an uncommon mouth, too (“her unusual letterbox mouth hung blackly open”).
One doesn’t come to a Cusk novel for plot however for her extra-fine psychological equipment. But there’s a honest quantity of plot in Second Place. M’s 21-year-old daughter, Justine, is house along with her boyfriend. M loves her daughter however resents the method kids drive their mother and father to present up their locations in the solar.
Justine grows near Brett, who’s both uniquely completed or a truth-stretcher worthy of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. Brett claims to have gone to medical college, sailed alone throughout the Atlantic, had a solo present of her images and danced in the London ballet, although not all at the similar time, I believe.
The novel’s climactic moments start when L lastly agrees to color M’s portrait, and Tony — who’s earthy, dependable, taciturn, a rock — threatens to go away her if she goes to him. She goes; by some means, this portray can be a signature on the backside line of her character.
Tony is that this novel’s ethical beacon; his instance issues, as a result of the e book presses down on the matter of male privilege. M envies L’s freedom, in each his life and his artwork — his disregard for conference. He was fortunate to have been born in a male physique, she thinks. “A girl might by no means throw herself on destiny and anticipate to come back out of it intact.”
L is a man with none first rate instincts at all. Girls appear to encompass and attend to him as the houris do to the religious immortals in Islam’s paradise. He instructions everybody’s consideration however nobody can command his. Is he a sacred monster, or simply a monster? Is there a distinction?
If I might have rubbed a lamp and lightened this e book’s lurid intensities, I may need. It’s not a novel that gladdens the soul. However gladdening the soul has by no means been Cusk’s venture.
Second Place by Rachel Cusk | 183 pages | Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Dwight Garner c.2021 The New York Occasions Firm
