It isn’t clear if he’s real, but for M, his presence, and her decision not to confront him, poses some sort of moral question. She sees someone on a train whom she calls “the devil,” a frightening, sweating man with a black tooth and a little girl, whom he fondles. There are mentions of a wretched marriage and her own self-loathing. The first 16 pages are feverish: M, a young mother, is traveling alone in France. (This echoes Dodge’s book, which includes her letters to the poet Robinson Jeffers.)

Throughout Second Place, M addresses her account to someone named Jeffers, who she trusts will want to know the full story. There are elements of autobiography stirred in too M is a writer, and Cusk herself lived in Norfolk, England, where there’s an estuary very much like M’s marsh. Cusk draws lightly on the 1932 book Lorenzo in Taos, arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan’s account of her relationship with D.

Set in the modern day, Second Place chronicles M’s relationship with an artist called L - first her encounter with his paintings, then eventually her encounter with the person himself. The novel is the “Outline” trilogy’s narrative opposite: M binges on moral judgment, wallowing in self-examination, measuring and remeasuring every encounter for authenticity and relevance and value. Instead of passivity, we get velocity M flings herself desperately into her own drama. The protagonist of Second Place, however, whom Cusk calls only M, isn’t a sponge. (“I don’t think character exists anymore,” she told The New Yorker in 2018.) Faye rarely looks inward those books exude a kind of chilly spiritual equipoise. Instead, it nearly washes her away, saturating the reader’s brain beyond the possibility of absorbing more.Ĭusk has often seemed ambivalent about creating identities for her characters. This flood of detail and observation never reveals Faye’s personality. On and on, people monologue at Faye - on planes, in workshops, at restaurants. Although the books all share the same narrator, a woman named Faye, they are mostly constructed from minor characters’ stories. Her Outline novels, a trilogy published between 20, are beautiful but relentless.

Fight it, and it drags you down like undertow.Ĭusk has written tidally before. Though there is an identifiable plot in Second Place (something not always true of Cusk’s work), the book is an atmospheric, a mood piece, a drug. Boundaries melt and reform and melt again, each time with danger slightly closer - and we come to realize the narrator’s mental place of safety is dissolving too. People have been lost to the tide those who live on this coast are lulled by its subtle rhythms. She loves to watch the water moving in over the flat land, advancing stealthily in a silver sheet. The narrator of Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Second Place, lives at the edge of a marsh, a place of apparent peace.

Review of second place by rachel cusk