This is an interesting case. Firstly, the novel looks to depend in its structure on an obscure 1920s memoir, a knowledge of which would shed light on several things, like why this entire text is continually addressed to a person named Jeffers. However the author seems to not want us to make too much of the connection. To which I say, “ha!”. Literary criticism, amateur or otherwise, will not be dictated to by authors, will it.

The novel’s protagonist is a neurotic, and much of the book is her addressing her neurosis to this aforementioned Jeffers, its unknown silent recipient. She has invited the artist referred to as L to a retreat on her and her husband’s land, hoping that through some uncertain mechanism he will free her mind and give her the rebirth into freedom that she longs for. She has invested L with a near mystical potentiality over her and her emotional state swings wildly in his presence, from despair to hysteria and back again. Evidently this is modeled on that obscure memoirist’s experience of inviting D.H. Lawrence to her own retreat; Lawrence did not like the memoirist and neither does L like our protagonist. L, and presumably Lawrence, are rather unpleasant themselves.

Cusk’s prose is complex, often beautiful, often difficult. Here’s an excellent passage from when our protagonist first encounters L through his paintings and incorporates him into her melancholic universe:

The painting, by the way, was a self-portrait, one of L’s arresting portraits where he shows himself at about the distance you might keep between yourself and a stranger. He looks almost surprised to see himself: he gives that stranger a glance that is as objective and compassionless as any glance in the street. He is wearing an ordinary kind of plaid shirt and his hair is brushed back and parted, and despite the coldness of the act of perception – which is a cosmic coldness and loneliness, Jeffers – the rendering of those details, of the buttoned-up shirt and the brushed hair and the plain features unanimated by recognition, is the most human and loving thing in the world. Looking at it, the emotion I felt was pity, pity for myself and for all of us: the kind of wordless pity a mother might feel for her mortal child, who nonetheless she brushes and dresses so tenderly.

Another feature of the novel is the narrator’s strained relationship with her young adult daughter. As a parent myself I couldn’t identify with some of her attitudes towards her daughter, which edged into existential alienation at times, but this passage I mark well:

When Justine was younger there had been a feeling of malleability, of active process, in our relations, but now that she was a young woman it was as though time had abruptly run out and we were frozen in the positions we had happened to assume in the moment of its stopping, like the game where everyone has to creep up behind the leader and then freeze the second he turns around. There she stood, the externalisation of my life force, immune to further alterations; and there was I, unable to explain to her how exactly she had turned out the way she had.

Other times the prose refuses to cohere into meaning, no matter how many times I reread it. Here is L looking out at the horizon and speaking to the narrator:

‘I suddenly saw it, right out there,’ he said, pointing toward the distant blue shape of the receded tide, ‘the illusion of that death-structure. I wish I had understood before how to dissolve. Not just how to dissolve the line – other things too. I did the opposite, because I thought I had to resist being worn down. The more I tried to make a structure, the more it felt like everything around me had gone bad. It felt like I was making the world, and making it wrong, when all I was doing was making my own death. But you don’t have to die. The dissolving looks like death but in fact it’s the other way around. I didn’t see it to start with.’
When L said these things, Jeffers, I felt a thrill of vindication – I knew he would understand it!

Well the narrator may understand that, but I don’t! Are we meant to? Or is the confusion and incoherence something of what Cusk is aiming for? Is the reader supposed to take this as merely further illustration of the characters’ sad estrangement from the solid core of reality, from a healthy functioning in the physical world, a functioning embodied in contrast by the narrator’s husband Tony, a quiet soul content to be working on the land? I’m not certain.

In any event it’s a novel that lends itself to much thought and discussion of what it’s about and what it’s doing. If there is no clear morality here, no clear take on what it means to be human, it is at least intellectually interesting. And sometimes quite confusing. ( )

brilliant ( )

Now I need to read Mabel Dodge Luhan's "Lorenzo in Taos."

5

A woman, M, invites an acclaimed painter, L, to stay in her guesthouse ("Second Place") with the hopes that she will be his muse. Upon L's arrival, M quickly realizes that her expectations are not matching up with her reality, and she soon begins to feel as though she is coming in second place - a theme that runs throughout the rest of the novel (I found her writing specifically on becoming a parent equally heartbreaking and insightful).

I'm saying it here: no one writes quite like Rachel Cusk. There is such nuance in her writing that even the smallest sentences are so profound. If she wanted to write about the process of pasteurizing milk, I'd read it in a heartbeat. ( )

3.5⭐ ( )