Robin's Reviews > Second Place

Rachel Cusk, as it turns out, is a bit of an acrobat. More specifically, she's a tightrope walker, a writer who balances on the very, very fine line between brilliance and pretentiousness. It takes the most minute, feathery breeze to waft her in either direction.

Waft to the right, and she's saying brilliant things like:

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.

Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you’d better stop predicting what they’re going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.

Waft to the left, though:

The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal.

I have read this sentence over and over, and it still doesn't make any sense. That happened for me a lot in the reading of this brief novella.

Damn it. This is one of those reviews that is the hardest to write, because I have no desire to diminish something artful and thought provoking - and Cusk does provoke thought, especially in regards to motherhood and womanhood. However, lines like the one above (and many others like it) create an atmosphere of suffocating introspection, causing (for me, at least) more wafts to the left than to the right.

It all starts quite provocatively. Using a formal, epistolary tone, our navel-gazing protagonist, "M", addresses "Jeffers", telling him about the time she saw the devil on the train. The tone made me think of something slightly antique, like Robert Louis Stevenson, or even Bram Stoker. I liked that. The almost immediate tension she created promised delicious things. Unfortunately, I never quite came to understand the devil on the train part - what it meant, or how it factored into the rest of the story.

Our narrator then tells us about when, one night in Paris, she happens upon the paintings of "L". The paintings have a profound effect on her. Later, she invites "L" to stay at the property she lives on with her wise, mountainous husband Tony, on an unnamed marsh land, in a small cottage they call the Second Place.

"L", who shows up with someone less than half his age, is abusive and beastly, and our self-obsessed protagonist spends her time thinking about him and pining for his attention. She also moves through some interesting feelings about her daughter Justine, how it is to be a mother, how to show love, and how to be a woman.

Some of this is beautifully expressed, as I mentioned before. But I had a hard time spending so much time with "M", who seems like a person who has never so much as cracked a smile, and who analyzes with intensity every little tiny thing, sucking the very life out of it. I almost couldn't blame "L" for his nasty contempt.

The story is told in a dream-like way. It's unclear where or when this is set, although it feels like it could possibly be taking place during a pandemic. And people have the weirdest interactions. For example:

"You know, I've never wanted to be whole or complete."

"Why not?" I said.

"I always imagined it was like being swallowed," he said.

"Perhaps it's you that does the swallowing," I replied.

"I haven't swallowed anything," he said calmly. "Just taken a few bites here and there. No, I don't want to be completed. I prefer to try outrunning whatever's after me. I prefer to stay out, like kids on a summer evening stay out, and won't come in when they're called. I don't want to go to it. But it means that all my memories are outside me."

Sorry, but who talks like this? It's beautifully written, to be sure, but it means nothing to me. What does he mean, being whole is like being swallowed? What does it mean to have all your memories outside yourself?

I understood more at the end, when it is revealed that the novel is based on an actual historical account of an artist coming to stay on a benefactor's property. That knowledge helped and guided me somewhat, though I can't say it saved the day.

Despite my complaints and failure to fully connect with Second Place, I have to applaud Ms. Cusk for what she has done here - it takes guts to walk the tightrope.