Joan Colby's Reviews > The Country Life

The Country Life is an odd book. I disliked the narrator with her nervous tics, her incapacities and especially her stiffly artificial manner of speaking. The story focuses on the narrator, Stella, who in time we discover is a wife of a week’s duration fleeing her husband to take a position as companion to a disabled 17-year old boy. His well-to-do parents are difficult with secrets in their pasts. There are three other grown children and various country dependents, all quite odd in their own ways. Stella’s interaction with her charge, Martin, is the main theme of this somewhat plotless novel. Cusk has laden the book with enough unsolved mysteries to keep the reader turning the pages to find no denouement whatsoever, just an oblique hint of possibilities to come. While I can’t say I liked this novel, I admit it is strangely arresting.