“she saw herself always animated by a nameless dissatisfaction: it had filled her out, like the wind fills out a sail, and propelled her along while she did her best to steer a course. She didn’t know exactly where she was going, just that it was necessary to remain in motion while avoiding outright disaster.”

I read this book for our October bookclub discussion. The author was born in Canada to English parents, then spent some time in the US before the family returned to England. This novel is a contemporary domestic drama that looks at a day in the life of five different women living in upper middle class suburban England. It was shortlisted for The Orange Prize for fiction in 2007.

The story is essentially a scathing examination of the daily minutiae of the life of entitled white women in the suburbs. It is cleverly written, perspicacious and cutting but somewhat depressing. Some refer to it as Mommy lit, although I feel it would act as a fairly good deterrent to this lifestyle and could possibly be prescribed as a contraceptive.

The book shifts between different perspectives and scenes. Amanda hosts a morning tea for the school mums and their toddlers at her pristine house with white couches and decor with predictable results. Another group of mothers go shopping at a soulless mall, listening to banal advice on how to cover their unsightly bulges. Juliet tries to escape the monotony of her life and find inspiration and a return to her aspirations of brilliance by sharing Wuthering Heights with a group of uninspired teenage girls. Solly is pregnant with her fourth child and rents her spare room out to overseas students whose lives she finds more intriguing than her own rather beige existence. Maisie finds herself disillusioned and overwhelmed by the untidiness of her kitchen and possibly the smallness of her life. Christine hosts a dinner and struggles to hoist herself up the social ladder from her working class roots.

The novel shines a spotlight on the existential crises of a group of privileged women and their distinctly first world problems. Cusk writes brilliantly in a way that makes some of the characters seem very familiar, with their racism, self-absorption, obnoxious children, materialism and passive brand of feminism. Their husbands vary from the right-wing bigot type, to the ethereal, nice guy model who looks the part but just doesn’t quite get it.

Her writing is wise and vivid. Even the womens’ relationships to their homes and cleaning is analyzed. “She was so accustomed to feel the presence in herself of a power of renewal that she had been slow to sense that it was no longer there; that she now existed on a kind of loop or circuit that took her round the same places and brought her back again and again to the same things. It was not defiance but inability that explained her failure to impose herself on the kitchen: an appetite for cleanliness and order, for things to be cleared away so that they could be begun again, was simply no longer a desire she visited on her circuit.” Or, “She felt entombed, unprotestingly, in the untidiness of the house: it was draped over her like a shroud with no openings for her arms and legs, so that when she walked around it or reached out to touch it she felt a kind of dragging following movement, and a sense of amputated numbness.”

This book is worth reading as a cynical and sagacious study of modern suburban life, but don’t expect positivity or inspiration! ( )

Five mothers who live in prosperous Arlington Park are the subject of this book. We look at their lives during a single rainy day. Their husbands are shadowy, their children pretty ghastly, and the women themselves seem, for different reasons, to be a pretty grim bunch. They have lives that are pretty dreary, choked with unpleasant routine.

And yet it’s a book to read with satisfaction and pleasure. It can be funny, despite everything, and its real joy is the detailed yet telling descriptions of familiar things: a shopping centre, a bedroom, a kitchen the morning after, and in its evocation of mood.

I wouldn’t want to pass much time with any of these women in real life, but between the pages of a book, they were definitely worth getting to know. ( )

Finished this a couple months ago now but still wanted to leave a review. Like others, this book left me a little disappointed and I am worried this marks a turn into a style of spending a short amount of time cast awful characters and never really scratching the surface, which is how I felt about Outline, Then again if it is done well, like in The Lucky Ones, it really blows my mind. The ballet shoes and so many other vivid descriptions: the literary club, the park, the mall are so wonderful but in the end it didn't add up to much for me, unfortunately. Think I'm going to try one of her memoirs when I next read her. ( )

Beautifully written in parts but I felt the short story-like structure jumping from character to character didn't really work as well as a more longer-form narrative would have done. Although many of the characters do re-appear later in the book, I found that as some level of interest and character insight was being reached the chapter would come to a close and focus on someone different.

Need to take a break from reading books about white, middle class people too. Felt like their suburban lives was too much of an easy target here for Cusk, and didn't ever really reach the heights of her superlative Outline trilogy. ( )

This is very well written, but somewhat depressing and bleak. Very well described scenes from a suburban life of disappointment. ( )