Many pages later she asks, "Does catastrophe have the power to free us, Jeffers?" The conceit feels forced. We have no idea who Jeffers is, but rather irritatingly, Cusk repeats his name every few pages, lest we suspect that she's speaking into a void: "Do you understand it, Jeffers? I have wanted to be free my whole life but haven't managed to liberate my smallest toe," she writes. What follows is a dramatic account of a difficult guest's effect on his intense hostess and her family, including Tony and the narrator's grown daughter, Justine, as told after the fact to someone named Jeffers. Yet she continues to think about the visceral connection she felt with L through his work, and invites him to stay in their guest cottage in the woods, which they call the Second Place. (This, of course, is somewhat akin to Cusk's experience in the aftermath of her first marriage, which she chronicled with blistering fury in Aftermath, garnering harsh opprobrium, in part for what was seen as her anti-domestic stance.)īook Reviews 'Coventry' Touches On Gender, Self-Definition In Taking Control Of One's Narrativeįifteen years after these dark times, M is happily married to Tony, a large, loving, uncomplicated, outdoorsy man who "didn't believe in art - he believed in people, their goodness and their badness, and he believed in nature." They live comfortably on the isolated English coastal marsh where he was brought up by his adoptive family. But instead of freedom after leaving her disapproving husband, the immediate result was the loss of her home, money, friends, and, for a year, her daughter, then just four years old. Later on, she tells L she was so struck by the sense of freedom his landscapes emitted that they gave her the courage to change her life. Second Place traces the arc of M's fraught relationship with L, beginning with the moment, as an unhappy "young mother on the brink of rebellion," she first saw his paintings in a Paris gallery. Essentially, it's a domestic novel combined with a novel of ideas in which Cusk continues her cerebral exploration of issues of freedom, how art can both save and destroy us, the rub between self-sacrifice and self-definition in motherhood, and the possibilities of domestic happiness. Unlike the trilogy, it is neither episodic nor plotless. A writer we know only as M delivers a long monologue relaying the story of her obsession with a famous painter dubbed L. The Outline trilogy is a hard act to follow, but Second Place is an excellent next step. Would she go back to her earlier, more conventional satires of the stresses of family life? Or would she continue to probe questions about the connection between freedom and gender and art and suffering in serial conversations with strangers? Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, which so brilliantly pushed against the confines of fiction to explore the power of narrative, left us wondering what she would write next.
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