BookBrowse Reviews Second Place by Rachel Cusk

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A mesmerizing prism of a novel exploring a woman's navigation through relationships and art.

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Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy drew much of its substance from monologues and dialogues that swirled around a frequently near-invisible protagonist, a writer named Faye. Her first book since the conclusion of the trilogy, Second Place, is based on the heated interactions between author D.H. Lawrence and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan that occurred during Lawrence's stay in Taos, New Mexico (see Beyond the Book). While this premise may sound highly specific, its influence is not obvious within the confines of the story, which generates a similar sense of everyday intrigue as Cusk's previous novels, despite some key differences.

The first-person narrator, a middle-aged woman known only as M, invites an artist, L, to stay in a second residence (the "second place") belonging to her and her husband, Tony, on the remote marshland where they live. L has had a significant influence on M through his painting; she feigns casualness in asking him to visit, when in reality she craves a deep connection with him. Caught up in her feelings towards L is her anxiety about being trapped in her existence as a woman — she glimpses in L's work a freedom that she thinks is specific to men and that she would never be able to attain for herself, and so she seeks some sort of validation from the artist instead. But L appears to be set against giving her this validation, and the strange, toxic dynamic that he and M become embroiled in eventually leads to tension between M and Tony. This situation is complicated by the presence of three other characters: a young, attractive woman named Brett whom L has brought along with him; Justine, M's adult daughter from a previous marriage; and Kurt, Justine's boyfriend.

Some aspects of Second Place's mood and structure are reminiscent of Gothic literature and horror fiction. It opens with a dramatic flourish as M recollects having met "the devil" to someone named Jeffers, a thread that leads the reader to her obsession with L and the central events of the book, which involve the characters stumbling through uneasy social relations in the wilderness. However, the story is less sprawling but more complex than these traits might suggest. In general, Cusk's novel has a chameleon quality: On one level, it can be read as a philosophical exploration of large, somewhat unwieldy themes like "men," "women" and "art." On another, it's about one woman's understanding — and misunderstanding — of how those subjects apply to her and her own life.

The root of M's existential distress may be summed up in something she notes that Tony has said to her: that she underestimates her own power. As she focuses on her limitations, she overlooks the effect she has on others, and this tendency plays into how the reader receives her words. Her inner monologues are fraught, but often with humorous results. At one point, while bemoaning her inability to live freely, she makes a comment on the nature of potatoes: "They throw out these white fleshy arms because they know it's spring, and sometimes I'll look at one and realise a potato knows more than most people do." At another point, she recalls meeting a psychoanalyst in the street months after he attempted, and failed, to help her, and admonishing him for having "a little air of reproach." She then describes his hasty retreat: "Partway through my speech the psychoanalyst raised his arms in a gesture of surrender: he had turned completely white, and looked suddenly frail and aged, and began stepping backwards away from me on the pavement with his arms still raised, until he was far enough to turn and run." Cusk's portrayal of M allows the reader to see her flaws while still feeling genuine sympathy for her, and respecting the journey she takes to gaining a fuller understanding of herself as she considers L's own limitations and the limitations of art.

While the connection to the story of Lawrence and Luhan is one readers may find interesting, Cusk's unnecessary adherence to certain details of her characters' real-life counterparts accounts for the most questionable and incongruous parts of the novel, particularly Tony's racial background. M describes him as dark-skinned and similar in his looks to Native Americans. She explains that he was adopted and raised by a white family and never looked into his origins. However, he is clearly based on Luhan's husband, a Pueblo Indian named Tony, which makes the halfhearted way in which the character's background is handled even more distracting: Tony is portrayed as strong, silent, more centered than the other characters and closer to the earth. With this set-up, there would have been room for Cusk to actively explore the discomfort created by these surface elements that brush against Native stereotypes — for example, by fleshing out more of a visible relationship between Tony and his background, regardless of his childhood circumstances, or by giving race as legitimate a place in the story as gender — but they unfortunately feel like more of a decorative acknowledgment of the author's inspiration than functional pieces of the story.

Regardless of how Second Place came to be, it's a taut and engaging novel full of personal and philosophical suspense that offers a complicated look at a woman struggling to understand herself and her place in the world. Like Cusk's previous work, it makes the otherwise banal endlessly intriguing. The type of book that benefits from multiple rereads, it provides a continually captivating — and often amusing — glimpse into how a person's self is defined by other people, and what it means to live for oneself.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2021, and has been updated for the May 2022 edition. Click here to go to this issue.