Intriguing; hard to love

I can’t help feeling in awe of Rachel Cusk, which can stop you enjoying a book, sinking into its world and allowing it to envelop you. You keep stopping to admire the view. With the previous trilogy (Outline etc), I could do both. I was entranced by the narrative technique, the ‘characters’, the sophistication and accuracy of the language.

In Second Place, I was puzzled. I had to read in short bursts. Partly, I would run out of interest, or become exasperated with the scatty, chatty, exclamation-mark-infested narration. Partly, the meal was too rich, there were too many hard-core, interesting, complex ideas about life and love to digest at once. And partly, also, I realised we were never going to know what had caused the mysterious breakdown in the narrator’s psychic composure, her previous marriage, nor the identity of the person (‘Jeffers’) to whom all this book is apparently addressed.

Which was a bit annoying.

I couldn’t relax into the voice of the book, it seemed at once elaborately sophisticated and at the same time clumsy, overworked. I thought ‘Rachel Cusk writes better than this, doesn’t she?’

Then I got to the acknowledgement at the end, about the book being inspired by Mabel Dodge’s story. D H Lawrence. Mabel Dodge Luhan, the wealthy American lover of letters who, when the Lawrences got to New Mexico on their endless life-search for somewhere that Lawrence’s poor health could handle, and somewhere that wasn’t deathly and life-denying, kind of adopted him. And put up with Lawrence’s glorious wife Frieda, smoking and sulking in the cabin while resplendent Mabel and deaf little Hon Dorothy Brett contorted themselves in worship of the great writer. Then everything in Second Place hung together, because I was aware of Rachel Cusk’s admiration of D H Lawrence, and loved her for it, as his work and, I suppose you have to call it now, his value-system, is so unfashionable and I have always felt rather guilty about the way I love his writing and the force of the personality behind it.

So yes, a flawed and fascinating experiment, in my view, this ‘Second Place’, a title that describes both the locus of the book, a kind of guest or second home built near to the narrator’s uncomfortable house on what feels like an Essex marshland, and the way the narrator feels about her role as a woman, a wife, a mother, a writer. Things happen. Her daughter and her awkward partner turn up and affect the dynamic between the narrator and her partner, a strong, silent, Lawrentian kind of ‘Indian’ fellow; but more importantly, an artist (‘L’ of course), turns up with an unexpected, glamorous girlfriend, takes over the Second Place and pokes at the difficulties and strains in the narrator’s life and personality.

Always a worthwhile author to read, and I did feel a little worthy, finishing it, but try it and see.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and Faber for giving me a digital copy to read pre-publication.