"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.)

"Transit" by Rachel Cusk

An audio book

Framed essays and colourfully idiomatic monologues with illustrative anecdotes. Not much about the main character - a single mother (writer) with 2 sons. She receives a horoscope that she knows is computer generated hoax, but she pays to read the details anyway. She's returned to the city after being in the countryside for years. Cities (unlike the countryside) provide structures and standard templates so people can describe themselves in fewer words. An estate agent expounds his theory about who buys what - a creative personlike her should buy a dump.

She sees an ex, Gerald (now a father), by chance. He never moved away. He knocked down all the internal walls in his place. She gets builders to provide estimates for soundproofing the dump she's moved into. The neighbours below in the basement complain about the noise, swearing at her repeatedly. The builder says the clients don't notice he's there after a while. The boys stay with their father while work is done.

Her hairdresser thinks that adults are children in disguise. He doesn't know why some try so hard to change their appearance.

She's a guest at a book festival. A gay co-panelist Julian, deprived of love as a child, theorises about why people write. After, the chair accompanies her to her hotel and kisses her aggressively. She gets away.

A 39 year-old female student who she's tutoring is in her flat. She relates to a US painter who made himself difficult to love. She wanted to sleep with a famous photo-journalist in Paris, but he turned him down.

. The narrator has phoned the chair, asking to have a drink with him. Another builder talks to her. Polish, he designed and built his family's house. His father didn't like that the big windows let people see right through it. That's when he left for England. Gerald also liked living in such a house.

Her friend Amanda started going out with a builder. A 6 week paid job became a free one that's taken more than 2 years so far. She'd worked in the fashion world, unknowing self-delusion.

A student had driven to France to buy a dog from a German woman who'd started liking dogs in Egypt. A theory of consciousness emerges.

During a first date with an adoptee who had wanted to inherit his father's tool she says that it's "as if living were an act of reading, finding out what will happen next". Having builders in somehow disrupts that stability.

She goes to a dinner party where parents bring kids. She observers the kids and also meets a 40+ Swedish mother. Parenthood is studied - how a man might become a different sort of father after remarrying. Someone realises that his life was a sequence of attempts to merge with something or someone else - something that could be internalised. Someone says that fate is a purer form of truth. At the end she "lets herself quietly out of the house".

She's observant of signs of aging. A person has young skin "like a fold in a curtain that remains unfaded". "Amanda had a youthful appearance on which the patina of age was clumsily applied as if, rather than growing older, she had merely been carelessly handled"

Themes include - Truth and freedom; Rebuilding a house = rebuiding a life; Paris as hope.

Other reviews

• Helen Dunmore
• Tessa Hadley
• Daniel Aureliano Newman (Transit won’t thrill everyone: it will enrage those expecting plot, and it may unsettle those expecting a straightforward depiction of family drama and self-discovery. But many will read it with the breathless exhilaration it deserves. ... Part of the effect is due to Cusk’s handling of mood and tone, a skill she shares with Kazuo Ishiguro. She also knows exactly how to let a sentence unfold. Erudite but never grandiloquent, Cusk writes so well it’s easy to overlook how experimental her method is, and how profound her insights. Few novelists so deftly manage the Big Questions.)
• Christie Watson (the view in the distance was a women’s prison. On a clear night, “the tips of the prisoners’ cigarettes could be seen as they smoked on the walkway along their cells.”)

"Kudos" by Rachel Cusk (Faber and Faber, 2018)

On the inside flap it says "Kudos completes Rachel Cusk's trilogy with overwhelming power. The trilogy is one of the great achievements in fiction." Wow.

It's a succession of monologues by people (man on next plane seat, publisher, fellow author Linda, Linda's plane-seat neighbour, interviewer, tour guide, etc) who the main character meets while going to a literary conference. Typically we're given a short description of the speakers before they launch into their monologue. They're all well-spoken, analytical and revealing even if they've not met before. The words of wisdom are shared out pretty evenly amongst them. Duty vs Love, Responsibility vs Freedom are amongst the themes, particularly within marriages where there are children.

We learn about the main character mostly via the others - that's she's got married again (p.84), etc. She has 2 sons, one in his last year of school, one living with his father. A son phones her at the end, asking to fly over to her. She says yes, and goes to a nudist beach. As she swims she watches a man urinate into the sea.

I wondered if the book could have been a non-fiction piece about modern parent-hood from a woman's perspective - how the promise of equality and feminism has turned out. As it is, the illustrative anecdotes are too long, stopping before conclusions can be drawn. Little is gained by introducing the characters because they're all much the same.

Here are some extracts that caught my eye while I was trawling for connections -

Pre-emptive self-criticism

• "She never said anything unless she had something important to express, which made you realise how much of what people generally said - and he included himself in this statement - was unimportant" (p.94)
• "It's a saddening thought, she said, that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it" (p.132)
• "He had noticed, for instance, that my characters were often provoked into feats of self-revelation by means of a simple question" (p.145)
• "what would his poetry be worth if he wrote it while living in the same zoo as all the other denatured animals, safe but not free?" (p.184)
• "where everything was discussed but nothing examined, so that there was no danger of passing through the mirror, as he put it, into the state of painful self-awareness where human fictions lose their credibility" (p.200)
• "'Not everyone is cruel. Perhaps,' he said, 'you have just been unlucky'" (p.202)
• "You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person" (p.230)

A couple, plus one

• Linda talks about a story she's been struggling with. She got "talking to a writer who told her that every day, when he sat down to write, he would think of an object that didn't mean anything to him and would set himself the task of including it somewhere in that day's work ... he suggests a hamster ... The problem, she now saw, was that she had been trying to describe her husband and daughter using materials - her feelings - that no one else could see. The solid fact of the hamster made all the difference. She could describe them petting and fawning over it while its imprisonment got increasingly on Linda's nerves, and the way it solidified their bond so that Linda felt left out" (p.55)
• "expressed as a triangle, for instance, the Adam/Eve/serpent relationship is more tangible, since the function of triangulation is to fix two points by means of the third and therefore establish objectivity. If I was interested in metaphors, he said, the serpent's role is merely to create a viewpoint from which Adam's and Eve's weaknesses can be observed, and thus the snake might be representative of anything that triangulates the relationship of two identities, such as the arrival of a child might triangulate its parents" (p.96). I think triangulation fixes one point by means of two others
• "but isn't it the case, he said, that it's the random thing that is so often the tool to lever yourself out of your rut?" (p.115)

Parenthood versus freedom

• "My husband and I, in other words, had done our duty, and it was now that I considered taking some of those feminist principles I had distributed far and wide and using them for myself. The truth was that I had long wondered what might lie outside the circumscribed world of my marriage, and what freedoms and pleasures might be waiting for me there" (p.76)
• "I have met people who have freed themselves from their family relationships. Yet there often seems to be a kind of emptiness in that freedom" (p.81)
• "the biological basis of parenthood was essentially antithetical to reason, and as such could be seen as a whole system of inverted logic" (p.88)
• "It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along" (p.110)

Misc

• "He wore a heavy silver watch on his wrist and new-looking leather shoes on his feet" (p.3) (good places to wear watches and shoes)
• "She was a tall, soft, thick-limbed woman made even taller by the elaborately strappy high-heeled sandals she wore on her feet" (p.43) (the sentence could have ended with "by her elaborately strappy high-heeled sandals")
• "[her nose] was upturned and snub-ended and had a deep V in its bridge, as though someone had drawn it with a certain license, to make a point about the relationship between destiny and form" (p.70)
• "'... Though of course if he were a woman,' she said, leaning more confidentially towards my ear, 'he would be scorned for his honesty, or at the very least no one would care.'" (p.147)
• "There are a number of works, she said, executed when Bourgeois was the mother of small children, in which she portrays herself as a spider, and what is interesting about these works is not just what they convey about the condition of motherhood - in distinct contrast, she said, to the perennial male vision of the ecstatically fulfilled madonna - but also the fact that they appear to be children's drawings drawn in a child's hand" (p.190)

No chapters, only the occasional vertical centimetre of white space until p.122 where there's a half-page gap.

Other reviews

• Kate Clanchy (In her novels, Cusk had never been comfortable with complex, long-form plots, but at the same time was doggedly intellectual, intent on foregrounding ideas ... Almost all Faye’s conversations are with people who are also interested in writing down stories, or indeed are in the act of writing Faye down for an interview, and there is a self-consciousness to all this, a riddling, hall-of-mirrors element that is the reverse of the radical humility of the first two books.)
• Patricia Lockwood (in these books she is very specifically exploiting the public conversations of men, which they consider genial and beneficent, but which women very often consider a burden or an intrusion.)
• Katy Waldman (Cusk believes that traditional fiction is broken; she seems to long for an alternative that is wholly unauthored, without artifice. In the service of that vision, she dispenses with every convention she can think of: plot, dialogue, interiority. Her recent books have a searching quality; they chase after radical realism, the authenticity of the ascetic who forswears all but the bones of life.)
• Lloyd Evans (Cusk has a technical quirk which is noticeable in virtually every sentence she writes. All her characters have the same rhythms of speech, irrespective of their age, sex, or nationality. And they express themselves in the same register: detached, knowing, melancholy and sophisticated. ... Fey is constantly disappointed by lazy, deceitful or incompetent males)
• Maggie Doherty (The question of female freedom, its variations and limitations, is one that has preoccupied Cusk throughout her career. ... The women of Kudos grapple with the legacy of second-wave feminism and wonder why, if we’re closer to gender equality than ever, they still feel so trapped and miserable ... The episode is typical of the trilogy: It’s a series of stories nested within each other like Russian dolls, each taking up the theme of captivity. ... Although Cusk’s material here is the same as in her earlier novels, she has reworked it so that it’s almost unrecognizable in its new form. The formal strategies she’s devised—outlining and erasing, compiling and undercutting—allow her to write honestly and precisely about the many sacrifices that women and men make in order to abide by the rules of domestic life. Unlike her memoirs, which at times can feel overwrought, Cusk finds a way here to be serious without being self-serious. ... If, at times, this fiction feels claustrophobic, with its fixed gender roles and its preclusion of alternative ways of living and loving, it is also compelling in subtle and surprising ways. Cusk has produced a portrait of domestic life that will resonate for some and feel entirely foreign for others—those to whom freedom comes more easily.)

"A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother" by Rachel Cusk (Fourth Estate , 2008)

The sections are more thematic (e.g. about feeding) than chronological. She also adds what came to mind from novels - War and Peace, etc. ("Motherhood for Emma Bovary is an alias, an identity she occasionally assumes in her career as an adulterer" p.89). In the introduction she writes

• with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers; and even then only mothers who, like me, find the experience so momentous that reading about it has a strangely narcotic effect (p.3)
• I am certain that my own reaction, three years ago, to the book I have now written would have been to wonder why the author had bothered to have children in the first place if she thought it was so awful (p.4)

My favourite section was the visit to the toddler group starting on p.168. Here are some extracts from other sections -

• The baby "is at once victim and autocrat" p.30
• "It is as if I have come to the house of someone who has just died, someone I love, someone I can't believe has gone" p.50
• "it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life" p.65
• "Brief pauses begin to appear in the score of motherhood, silences like the silences between album tracks, surrounded by sound but silences nonetheless. In them I begin to glimpse myself, briefly, like someone walking past my window. The sight is a shock, like the sight of someone thought dead." p.207
• "When the evening comes I prepare the bottle. Her father is to give it to her, for we are advised that this treachery is best committed not by the traitor herself but by a hired assassin" p.107
• "with the baby's birth a lifetime of vanity vanished into thin air. Like gestures of love that abruptly cease, I come to value my habit of self-adornment only with its disappearance: it was proof that I cared, and without it I feel a private sense of sad resignation, as if some optimistic gloss has been stripped from my life. Sometimes I think back to that history of caring - as a self-conscious child, an anxious teenager, an attempted woman of fashion - amazing that it could have ended so precipitately, for it wa in a modest way a civilisation, a city built from the days of my life. The last chapter of this history - pregnancy - was as vivid as any other: it contained no hint of an ending, no clue that things were about to change. It is as if some disaster has occurred which has wiped my out" p.133

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway
• Ian Sansom (Cusk's work is characteristically elegant in diction ... rather than attempting to explain these experiences, she merely admits to them as a huge confused mass of thoughts. She is articulate, but she appears often to be talking to herself; she feels indignant, but comes across as petty and irritable.)

"Outline" by Rachel Cusk (Vintage, 2014)

The main character's on her way to Athens to teach story writing for a week. Each chapter comprises direct/reported speech about a dialogue the main character has. The reported speech can drift towards essay -

My neighbour turned to me again, and asked me what work it was that was taking me to Athens. For the second time I felt the conscious effect of his enquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp. I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing - a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball - and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn't sure (p.17)

The main topic of the long monologues is marriage breakdown and how to deal with the children. She sometimes comments on people's contributions as if they were stories. Questions of what constitutes a story, and the relationship between story-telling, autobiography and self-development arise naturally from such discussion -

• "a story might merely be a series of events we believe ourselves to be involved in, but on which we have absolutely no influence at all" (p.137)
• "Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter" (p.191)
• "the role of the artist might merely be that of recording sequences" (p.206)
• "I would like to be a D.H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels" (p.209)
• "while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was" (p.239)
• "drama became something real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out at the world. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.
  I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself" (p.246)
• "Whenever she conceived of a new piece of work, before she had got very far she would find herself summing up ... As soon as something was summed up, it was to all intents and purposes dead, a sitting duck, and she could go no further with it ... And not just books either, it was starting to happen with people " (p.232)

Other minor themes include the influence of language choice on thought, and what animals might symbolise. We piece together the main character's persona gradually, but I'm not sure that it's a character-based piece. It's a montage of case-histories with a bit of light theory thrown in. Some sections (e.g. the description of what it's like being in a plane; the take-off procedures, etc) achieve little. Ben Marcus' "I can say many nice things" fits as many ideas into a short story.

Other reviews

Julie Myerson (this has to be one of the oddest, most breathtakingly original and unsettling novels I've read in a long time.)

Elena Seymenliyska (Cusk confounds expectations by letting her heroine find power in invisibility. By rising quietly like a spirit from the chalk outline of her former self, she is no longer part of anyone’s narrative. She can finally become unchained from whatever might once have defined her. ... Outline is full of such wonderful surprises: subtle shifts in power and unexpectedly witty interludes.)

Elaine Blair

Britt Peterson (When Cusk first blew onto the scene in the early ’90s with the publication of Saving Agnes, she was a photogenic and brilliant Oxford grad who always sounded a bit depressive in interviews. ... About a decade later, the merciless reception of Cusk’s 2001 memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming A Mother, was perhaps inevitable. ... Hatred of Cusk really peaked in 2012 with Aftermath: On Marriage And Separation)

Heidi Julavits (That Cusk struggles with emotional versus intellectual (and private versus public) gender pressures and desires is what makes her work both incendiary and divisive. She is willing to say what is true for some — ergo true — and complicated but is often neither politic nor pretty.)