"Second Place" by Rachel Cusk

An audio book.

A monologue addressed to Jeffers.

She (M) met a devil on a Paris train while away from husband and child - a man with a much younger girl. The night before she'd been chatted up by a famous author. She was flattered. He didn't ask her to spend the night with him. She saw a retrospective exhibition of an artist's work. He's only 45. She felt a rapport with his work, especially the landscapes.

15 years later she lives with Tony on a farm in the marshes. He's dark-skinned unlike the locals. Adopted. She'd always felt that her life would be better were she male. She'd thought herself ugly. They invite artists to stay for a while. Tony distrusts chat. Many of their guests do too. She invites the exhibition artist, L. She wants to see the marsh landscape through his eyes. Justine (her daughter) plus her partner Kurt are staying, both currently unemployed. She confuses Kurt with Justine's father sometimes. Justine treats him rather like the narrator treated Justine's father.

Before L's delayed arrival she confides in Justine about her earlier life. L arrives with a beautiful girl, Brett, which irritates the narrator. She'd hoped to use him to improve her self-image. Is he using Brett as a shield? L and Brett stay in "the second place". Brett tells Justine that she was a ballerina, that she'd gone to medical school, and that she'd sailed across the Atlantic. She asks the narrator if she fancies L. She says that she and L no longer have sex. He's worried that he's getting old. She thinks her next career might be painting. Al left home in mid-teens, became famous early. He tells the narrator that he never wanted to be whole or complete.

The narrator's written some "little books". Kurt decides that he's going to be a writer. At an evening soiree he bores people with an hour-long reading. After, he tells M that L wants to destroy her, and that L wanted Kurt to do the opoosite of what Justine wanted.

We learn that a month after returning from Paris, M lost her home, money and friends. She thinks that "my individuality had tormented me my whole life with its demand to be recognised". On her way to being L's model, wearing her wedding dress, Tony angrily calls M back. She walks on, sees that L's doing a painting of Adam, Eve and the snake where she's Eve, then turns back, only to find that Tony has driven away.

He returns. L has a stroke that affects his right hand. Brett leaves, and Kurt goes with her (she knows publishers). M's wary of helping L. Tony and (mostly) Justine do it. He starts doing self-portraits, which later will trigger his revival. They're death-haunted, "Death our only God".

M believes in the plot of life - destiny. L had come to represent for her an escape from that. He hates her, says that all her goodness has been passed onto Justine. His friend of 20 years (Arthur, an ex studio assistant) turns up, offering help and money. He (40ish) tells her not "to kept a snake as a pet". Later, Justine and Arthur get together.

M and Justine forget their swimwear and end up swimming naked. It's the first time for many years that they've seen each other like that. It's a moment that lasts forever. L might have been watching. L suddenly leaves for Paris, dying soon after he gets there. He left Justine a painting, making her the richest person M knows. "True art means seeking to capture the unreal," he wrote.

There's little description, and it could all be symbolic. The meanings of the symbols are pondered over. There's little dialectic - people don't come to a conclusion; individuals don't tackle an issue from various viewpoints before reaching a conclusion.

Other reviews

• Anthony Cummins (an intimate psychodrama in the shape of a social comedy about the hazards of hospitality, ... with the novel’s diction caught between the lecture hall and the analyst’s couch. ... 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 ... Luhan addressed her memoir to the poet Robinson Jeffers, but does that justify Cusk having M continually address a never-explained “Jeffers”?)
• Miranda Popkey (Presenting only the premises and the conclusion means asking your reader to take you on faith; but start walking her through Cusk’s arguments and before too long you find you’re merely rescribing the novel itself. ... 'The rigorously trained fingers of the concert pianist are freer than the enslaved heart of the music-lover can ever be.’ Cusk has rigorously trained her own fingers; she cannot play a false note. But how quickly the music, the transcendent music, fades into air.)
• Sam Byers (It is through these differing relationships to property that Cusk slowly, agonisingly, reveals the wound implied by the novel’s sly pun of a title: the uneven, contested, deeply gendered experience of freedom. L, the epitome of the arrogant, entitled, unconstrained male artist, experiences property not as a place or possession at all, but “as a set of inalienable rights attached to himself. His property was the radial sphere of his own persona; it was the environs of wherever he happened to be.” For the narrator, it is all so much more fragile, more tenuous, both hard won and easily lost.)