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Summary
Summary
A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy.
A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma--and disrupts the calm of her secluded household.
Second Place , Rachel Cusk's electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art's capacity to uplift--and to destroy.
Author Notes
Rachel Cusk was born on Feb 8, 1967 in Canada. She spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles and finished her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. That year she published The Lucky Ones (2003), her fourth novel, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. Since then she has published four more novels; her latest is Outline (2014). She has also written several non-fiction books. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) is a personal exploration of motherhood. The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009) is a memoir about time in southern Italy. In 2015 she made the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist with her title Outline.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Guardian Review
Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy essentially took the form of a string of monologues heard by a silhouetted but recognisably Cusk-like narrator as she teaches writing, renovates her flat and embarks on a book tour. As well as a way to shrug off the obligations of plot and scene-setting, the structure was a smart response to the hostility that greeted Cusk's 2012 divorce memoir, Aftermath; if you want me to shut up, she seemed to say, then so be it. The result was sophisticated and stimulating but also highly mannered, with the polyvocal conceit increasingly at odds with Cusk's cool monotone. By the third part, Kudos, with its never-ending parade of self-absorbed ignoramuses, the narrative engine felt pretty nakedly rigged for the purposes of marrying her trademark philosophical reflection with her other calling card - the kind of poison-pen portraiture for which she has had a reputation at least since 2009's The Last Supper, her disputed memoir of a summer among English expats in Tuscany. So what now? Brexit apparently encouraged Cusk to quit England for Paris, only for coronavirus to stall the move; her new novel suggests she's in limbo creatively, too. Second Place is the first-person testimony of another Cusk-like writer, M, who invites a celebrated painter, L, to stay in the annex of her marshland home. Craving his attention while her husband installs irrigation for the garden, she's more than a little touchy when L arrives with Brett, an aggravatingly multi-talented heiress who further rubs M up the wrong way when her style tips are gratefully accepted by M's 21-year-old daughter, Justine, formerly impervious to her mother's advice. So begins an intimate psychodrama in the shape of a social comedy about the hazards of hospitality, as L's studiedly aloof manner fuels M's horror of her "small and suburban" middle-aged obsolescence. Cusk's sans-serif Optima typeface, now as much a part of her brand as high-pressure deliberation on gender and selfhood, adds to an indefinable sense of threat, with the novel's diction caught between the lecture hall and the analyst's couch. "So much of power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you," M says; when her annex gets trashed, she's "shocked, and shock is sometimes necessary, for without it we would drift into entropy". As in Kudos, the glassy prose can feel like a two-way mirror with the author smirking on the other side; when Justine's execrable boyfriend unselfconsciously treats the household to a two-hour reading from his dragons-and-monsters fantasy opus-in-progress, I rather feared for anyone Cusk's own daughters had ever brought home. The setting, which recalls the much-publicised £2.25m Norfolk home Cusk recently sold, is among several details teasingly congruent with the author's own life ("I can't imagine your little books make all that much," L says, needling M about the property). But while Second Place indeed turns out to be fictionalised memoir, the twist is that it isn't Cusk's. An endnote advertises the novel's debt to the bohemian socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan's 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos, about DH Lawrence's chaotic stay at her artists' colony in New Mexico, where he ended up threatening to "destroy" his hostess, as L does M here. While reading Second Place together with Luhan's florid memoir (freely available online) shows the novel's more jarringly melodramatic elements to be preordained, it also casts doubt on Cusk's decision-making, since the book doesn't fully make sense without reading Luhan, and even then it's a close thing. Yes, Luhan addressed her memoir to the poet Robinson Jeffers, but does that justify Cusk having M continually address a never-explained "Jeffers"? Is the fact that Luhan married a Native American man reason enough for a passage on how M's husband looks like a Native American? Ultimately, there's something excessive and undigested in the novel's bid to recast Luhan's thwarted longing for Lawrence's recognition as a modern-day battle of wills between a sympathetically needy writer and standoffish painter. It's a pity, because as a tale of midlife malaise, Second Place glints with many of Cusk's typically frosty pleasures; she's especially sharp, for instance, on the fraught enterprise of parenting grownup children who return to the nest. In the end I couldn't help feeling that, freed from its source, the story would have got along just fine by itself.
Kirkus Review
Riffing on D.H. Lawrence's famously fraught visit with Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico, Cusk chronicles a fictional woman's attempt to find meaning in other people's art. Readers need not know anything about that literary-history byway, however, to enjoy this brooding tale. Highly praised for her recent, decidedly nonlinear Outline Trilogy, Cusk here rediscovers the joys of plot. Narrator M sets a dark tone with her opening recollection of how a meeting with the devil on a train leaving Paris opened her eyes to "the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things." Then she pulls back to her encounter the day before with an exhibition of paintings by an artist she calls L that spoke of "absolute freedom" to "a young mother on the brink of rebellion." Now, years later, divorced from her hypercritical first husband and a subsequent period of misery behind her, she is happily married to quiet, nurturing Tony and lives with him in "a place of great but subtle beauty" remote from the urban centers of whatever country this is. (Details are deliberately vague, but bravura descriptions of marshes and brambles evoke a fairy-tale landscape rather than New Mexico.) M clearly feels some dissatisfaction with this idyllic retreat since she writes to L through a mutual friend and invites him to stay in their "second place," a ruined cottage they rebuilt as a long-term refuge for guests. After some coy back and forth, L turns up on short notice with an unannounced young girlfriend in tow, forcing M to move her 21-year-old daughter, Justine, and her boyfriend, Kurt, to the main house. L clearly knows that M wants something from him (Cusk elliptically suggests a desire to be welcomed into an imaginative life M feels inadequate to enter on her own) and is determined not to provide it. Increasingly tense interactions among the three couples form the seething undercurrent to M's ongoing musings on art, truth, and reality. The inevitable big blowup is followed by reconciliations and relocations, capped by one of Cusk's characteristically abrupt conclusions with a bitter letter from L. Brilliant prose and piercing insights convey a dark but compelling view of human nature. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In Cusk's excellent new novel, following her Outline trilogy and essay collection, Coventry (2019), M. (the narrator) invites L. (a famous artist) to spend the summer at her family's home in a secluded marshland. Relationships form and unravel through small acts: a new hairstyle, a late-night swim, an invitation to sit for a portrait. These things happen, but they are not what the book is about. Rather, Second Place is about space and time, and who has the privilege to claim either. "I am here," L.'s paintings say to M., when she sees them in a Paris gallery 15 years before the summer at the marsh, giving her permission to say the same. "My time belongs to me," L. tells a houseguest who delivers a two-hour reading of an in-progress novel. There is a gendered asymmetry between L., who moves with an air of entitlement, and M., who recognizes herself when criticized, and also an expressive one between painting, described as providing "a location, a place to be," and language, "the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time." Cusk has written a novel about what it might mean to be whole within one's self and with others, and about the artist's responsibility and art's power.
Library Journal Review
Once again, Cusk (the "Outline" trilogy) delivers a novel so thorny with ideas that every sentence merits a careful reading, yet crafted in language as ringingly clear as fine crystal. Her protagonist is M, a fiftyish woman dwelling contentedly in unidentified marshlands with her solid, devoted husband, Tony; they live off the land and nearby sea while turning over a second house they've constructed to visiting artists and writers. Having encountered L's paintings as a young woman, an experience of deep identification that changed the direction of her life, M is eager to make L a guest. (Cusk wrote the novel in tribute to Mabel Dodge Luhan's Lorenzo in Taos, which recalls a similar visit D. H. Lawrence made to Luhan in New Mexico.) Though deeply reflective, even cerebral, M is also gushingly guileless, and the reader can tell from their first correspondence that having L visit is not a good idea. Indeed, he arrives with gorgeous young Brett and proceeds to undermine M's world in escalatingly cruel ways. It's wrenching reading, yet in the end M has gracefully readjusted her life, as L has not. VERDICT A gorgeously sculpted story of living and learning; for all readers.
