It pinned me down in the depths, where I thrashed and struggled to get free and swim to the brilliant surface of life – at least, that’s how it looked from below. Truly, Jeffers, I was a dog – there was such a heavy weight inside me, I could only writhe senselessly like an animal in pain. This writer was of course an insufferable egotist, as well as a liar, and not even a very believable one and I, alone in Paris for the night, with my disapproving husband and child waiting back at home, was so thirsty for love I would drink, it seemed, from any source. The trouble was, I had the dumb loyalty of a dog. I didn’t get sexual attention very often in those years, though I was young, and I suppose good-looking enough.
I met him at an art gallery opening, from which he took sufficient pains to extricate me that my vanity was gratified. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency.I had spent the evening in the company of a famous writer, who was actually nothing more significant than a very lucky man. It’s a novel that feels timeless, while dealing with ferocious modern questions. There is the erudition of the author’s Outline trilogy here, but with a tightly contained dramatic narrative. Cusk expertly handles the logistics of the crowded setting, building tension as the characters form unexpected, temporary alliances-Kurt and L, Brett and Justine-and M’s isolation increases. L paints portraits of everyone except M-which devastates her.
The characters enter an uneasy equilibrium on the marsh as allusions of a global financial disaster fill in the backdrop. M’s daughter, Justine, and her new boyfriend, Kurt, who reminds M of her first husband, move into the cabin just before L shows up with a gorgeous young woman named Brett. L’s art deeply affected M 15 years earlier when she was a young mother and was struck by the work’s “freedom” and how it was “elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke.” To her surprise, L accepts, before canceling.
They have built a guest cabin on their property, which they call the “second place.” Through a mutual friend, M invites a painter, L, to stay in the cabin. The narrator, M, is a writer living on an isolated coastal marsh with her second husband, Tony. Cusk’s intelligent, sparkling return (after Kudos) centers on a woman in crisis.
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