"Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?"

Rachel Cusk's novel, Second Place, is inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan's memoir, Lorenzo in Taos. It's about D.H. Lawrence's fraught visit in Taos upon Luhan's invitation. But the artistic license Cusk takes here is not to be understated. She carefully and sensitively crafts a unique style and structure where the inner lives of her characters glow and pale through the contemplative storytelling of her female protagonist, M. The entirety of the novel is addressed to one Jeffers. And it almost feels as if Jeffers is the reader. It tells a painter's, L, stay in an isolated coastal region where M lives. And while it is a novel that laboriously swims the marsh of relationships, in motherhood and marriage, at the helm it is a profound examination of how art can repel and magnetise an artist with their audience in close encounters. Idealisation of an artist when their art imparts a distinct resonation is not unusual. But there is frequently a danger in these idealisations. More so, once these ideals are shattered and replaced by the ugly truth. More so, when there is subtle crossover from being a mere audience to a (ridiculed) muse. A toxic power dynamic between them bind them to each other.

What makes Second Place emotionally captivating is its glimpses of existential epiphanies and self-realisations girded by M's being female. M's struggles and insecurities in her womanliness pervade her actions and decisions which dislodges her already uncertain place in the world as a woman. It is worth noting as well that M is a writer and L acknowledges this with a tone of mockery while equally dissatisfied with his own works. The enduring dependence of women with men is also alluded to with M's inspection of her own reliance and bond with them. Most importantly, there is also nod to the privilege men has in a society dominated and controlled by them. The amount of opportunities and recognitions men receive compared to women in the art realm alone is much too obvious to ignore.

Cusk paints a compelling language of realism within these pages with such affecting grace. It nudges you and make you look inward, see the hues of life forever altered by art, and clasp your own place in this world however vague and senseless it may be. Second Place is my first novel of Cusk. It is a memorable introduction. And I'll be sure to grab one or two of her other works the next time I visit the bookshop.

Thanks, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the advance copy.

Per Rachel Cusk's note at the end of the book, this is a homage to Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan that talks about the relationship between another M and L. M invited L, who is a famous artist, to her place where she believed people had artistic revelations due to landscape and life that occupants live. It's curious that M randomly sent invitation like this to people as it is not hundred per cent clear that how she is connected to them.

M's life on this quiet and secluded land was pretty bleak. She no longer felt like a woman that she used to be and started to question her prior decisions. I get the feeling that there was something about M we don't know that fills all the gaps in her account and answers the burning questions. Because I don't understand why L's validation was so important for her or why she invited him to her house in the first place or why she was bothered so much when L brought a company.

In about 200 pages, we get to hear a lot about being a woman, a mother, a partner and a human. Although not all specifics were given, we see how single event can be a trigger for multiple events or open cans of worms. If you are into introspectives, this could be the book for you!

Through her main narrator’s (M.) inner turmoils and insecurities as a woman (middle-aged), mother, ex-writer, wife despite her genuinely devoted (second) husband, Rachel Cusk explores a number of psychological and existential questions. Most prominently, she probes the boundaries between the desire to be free and yet feel safe; an oscillating nature of gendered relations as well as parenthood between the domineering authority and submission through love; the relations between art and reality of life; the dilemma about one’s path to inner fulfillment either through art as a creative but sometimes illusory presentation of reality or through reality itself, no matter how mundane, by finding the serenity and beauty in life’s simplicities. This is just scratching the surface of this deceptively airy, meditative and effortlessly flowing prose, underneath which one uncovers deeper layers of existential questions and a multitude of perspectives from each character, including what the eponymous “second place” figuratively means in one’s life (besides its obvious reference to a guest cottage hosted by of M. and her husband Tony).

While a relatively short novel (ca. 200 pages) it’s quite dense, requiring slower and repeated reading (I found re-reading some parts immensely rewarding, as if opening new doors to yet more interpretations), written with incisive intelligence and emotional intensity. The style is cerebral and yet also lyrical, the sentences are beautifully carved and sculpted but never weighty. On top of it all, the writing is eminently quotable. I found myself highlighting just about every page with thoughts or annotating margins with questions not only about M and other characters, their relations, psychological reversals and turns, but also about life, art, authentic living, love. Here is a very small sample:

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

"He doesn’t comment and he doesn’t criticise and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people. Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him but to myself, because as I’ve told you I’ve been criticised all my life: it’s how I’ve come to know that I’m there."

"You see, Jeffers, Tony refuses to see anything as a game, and by being that way he reveals how much other people play games…"

"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.
How fortunate I am that this astonishingly beautiful, intelligent, and originally written novel was my first encounter with Rachel Cusk. It surely will not be my last."

My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the advance copy via NetGalley.

I learned something new about myself or the world on almost every page of the book. I look forward to re-reading this so that I can dive deeper and uncover the layers that I did not pass through the first time through. I suspect the book itself is much like a marsh, and that if I don't tread lightly, I will sink into it.

A truly humble and compelling book. It's a bit difficult to review one that im rating 5 stars though. You just have to read it.

I will definitely be looking into the author's other works.

Where to start is the question when trying to write something about this TARDIS of a book. It’s short, but there is a vast amount more in it than relatively low page count would suggest. It is a book that demands a re-read, and probably several of them, with each new visit revealing more of the layers and themes. Consequently, this is a very simple review of stuff gleaned from a single reading.

I say it is stuff gleaned from a single reading, but I should be honest and acknowledge that I did something I don’t normally do which is to read several reviews by friends who have read the book before writing my own. So, in true Cusk style, some of this review is the words of others filtered to give you a view of my own feelings about the book.

The note at the end of the book makes it explicit that Second Place is inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan’s “Lorenzo in Taos” in which the author describes the time she invited DH Lawrence to visit her in New Mexico. I haven’t read that book and I don’t think it is absolutely necessary to read it to appreciate Cusk’s ”tribute to her spirit”. It is likely, though, as Paul points out in his review, that a knowledge of “Lorenzo in Taos” would reveal a whole host of connections between the two books, some of which he has documented: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3737696193.

The book begins intriguingly: ”I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting, the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life.” (Much of “Lorenzo in Taos” is in the form of letters to Robinson Jeffers, a poet). This incident clearly has a dramatic and traumatic impact on our narrator (M). Also in Paris, she encounters the work of L, a famous artist whose paintings make a deep impression on her. Several years later, M is living with her second husband, the enigmatic Tony, on a remote salt marsh when she decides to invite L to stay with them in a house they have built on their land (known as the “second place”). Most of the book is the story of L’s visit and its consequences which are a long way from what M envisaged when she made the invitation.

What emerges as M writes about L’s visit is both an emotional story of a damaged woman and a serious meditation on some big topics. Rather than me trying to capture those, you might do better to read reviews by

Meike: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3667448171
Graham: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3747318146

There’s also an insightful review by Roman C on the NetGalley page, along with some excellent reviews by people I don’t know (I’m just picking up some of the people I know or have communicated with online because I don’t think they will mind me mentioning them).

Which themes dominated for me? It’s fair to say that art has dominated my reading in 2021. I know it is only January, but already I have read House of Leaves, The Portrait of a Mirror, Understanding a Photograph, The Death of Francis Bacon, Stories with Pictures, Painting Time and Bolt From The Blue. All of these books feature art in one form or another as a key topic. Second Place joins that collection. I highlighted dozens of passages from the book (it is incredibly quotable) and many of those highlights were about art. M wants L to show her the marsh on which she lives as seen through his eyes. She wants him to paint her. She wants to become a kind of muse (maybe more) for L. But the book also discusses the relationship of art to reality (a subject treated in some depth in another art book I read towards the end of 2019 - Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”). And it talks in some depth about the artistic process and the impact of art on both the creator and the viewer.

”This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, not matter how brilliantly we imagined it.”

”I have often wondered, Jeffers, whether true artists are people who have succeeded in discarding or marginalising their inner reality quite early on, which might explain how someone can know so much about life with one side of themselves, while understanding nothing about it all with another."

The thinking about art is sometimes quite negative:

”For the first time, Jeffers, I considered the possibility that art - not just L’s art but the whole notion of art - might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction and our belief in the things of this world with the idea that there was something higher and better within us which could never be equalled by what was right in front of us.”

And finally

”How useful an artist can be in the matter of representation! I have always believe that the truth of art is equal to any scientific truth, but it must retain the status of illusion.”

This is just one of the themes Cusk explores and leaves the reader with plenty of food for thought. There’s also plenty to get your teeth into in other areas of art that spread into wider topics of patriarchy (to follow up on this, read Deborah Levy’s “Living Autobiography” trilogy which explores this in some detail in a wonderful series of books) and privilege. Plus there’s much to think about in areas such as motherhood (again, read the Levy trilogy as a companion to this - there’s a lot the two have in common) and relationships.

All this is just scratching the surface of a book that, as I say, really does need to be read several times.

My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley. My hope is that I will be discussing this book with others later in the year when it makes its way onto prize lists.

Second Place packs a lot in to its small frame. It’s a book addressed to a character named Jeffers, where M has invited an artist named L to come visit the coast where M lives. This is just a microcosm of the mysteries / puzzles / complexities this novel has to offer in the best possible way. The people in the home, the artist, the host, her children, are all existing in a safe haven amidst a dystopic-like outside world. There are many themes explored here: security, artistry and what it means to be a woman. Written in Cusk’s recognizable imagery and interiority, revelations, ruminations and the mining of the human psyche take center stage. Cusk is a writer for literary loves of tropes, twists and imagery. Thank you to Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Netgalley for the advanced review copy of this book.

So... it's only January and I've met one of my undoubted books of the year already!

This may not be as formally innovative as Cusk's Outline trilogy but it's arguably a more challenging book with its existentialist probings and sheer smartness. It's so rich and dense that any easy summary escapes me - and plot, of course, isn't the point anyway - but I will say that I made 80 notes and annotations in a book less than 200 pages long. This is a novel just begging for a re-read (and another re-read, a desert island book, for sure).

In some ways, what this reminded me of is Plato's dialogues where characters contemplate complex ideas, and different philosophical positions are in discussion, sometimes in the form of harsh clashes, with each other. As the dialogues are filtered through the authorial voice of 'Plato', so here they're verbalised through M, a female some-time author, who writes a series of letters to Jeffers, within which are contained the substance of the text, including some inset letters from the painter, L.

Ideas about subjectivity and objective 'truth', about gendered power dynamics, art and reality, how to live a 'free' life and what that might mean, fear and solace, beauty and rage, loneliness and connection, mother love, sexual/romantic love, love of self are all here, treated with sophistication and an assured intelligence. The very definition of the 'second place' varies by character, though the concept of the subsidiary position of women is crucially important.

Inspired by [book:Lorenzo in Taos|3043836], though seemingly set in the present, (there's a teasing 'global pandemonium' that has affected the stock markets and made travel difficult but people still hug and live 'normal' lives), the shade of D.H. Lawrence adds a dimension to this novel, not least in the biblical/mythological imagery of demons and temptation, a mural of Adam and Eve with the snake, and a mini-flood that follows a dramatic encounter.

Cusk's writing is fluent and graceful, such a pleasure to read, but incisive, too, in the way it balances forward movement and the stasis of contemplation. Anyone like me who has been waiting eagerly to see what Cusk would do after Kudos can breath a sigh of relief - this is superb!

ps. I hope a copy-editor has caught the horrible error at 99% of 'he glimpsed Justine and I swimming' - accusative case, it should be 'Justine and me', of course :)

“Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented? Do you understand it, Jeffers? I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven’t managed to liberate my smallest toe”.

M, middle aged, is married to second husband, Tony.
She is writing her friend, Jeffers......telling him about a letter she wrote to another ( artist) friend named L.

M tells Jeffers that the cottage she and Tony owned was once “sordid and quite sad”.
“We quickly realized it would have to be done over to rid it of that awful human type of sadness”.
They took the entire cottage down and rebuilt back up again, with Tony giving directions”.

M invited L to come stay in ‘Second Place’. The reader will untangle M’s purposes, and L’’s purposes ...for this visit.
Including, L brings along a young British woman named Brett.
Add to this visit M’s daughter and daughter’s boyfriend.

‘Second Place’... is both literally and figuratively
experienced.
The guest house itself, is the second place on the property. ‘Second’, also, symbolically relates to M’s life.

M tells Jeffers he has never met Tony, but believes they would get along.
The first thing that M tells Jeffers about her husband is that he is practical, as Jeffers himself is.
The next thing M says about Tony, is that he is not bourgeois.....
“not at all neglectful in the house that the very souls of the most bourgeois men are neglectful. He doesn’t show the weakness of neglect, and nor does he need to neglect something in order to have power over it. He does have a number of Certainties, though, which come from his particular knowledge and position and which can be very useful and reassuring until you find yourself a posing one of them! I have never met another human being who is so little burdened by shame as Tony and so little inclined to make others feel ashamed of themselves. He doesn’t comment and he doesn’t criticize and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people”.

It doesn’t take long to know ... that L is very different type of man than her husband, Tony.
M is struggling between reality and fantasy.

“Second Place” is a short novel.... but one that caused me to pause often ... pay close attention to all that wasn’t being said as much as what was.
M feels somewhere invisible and feels as though she’s been criticized her entire life.
She picked a husband that gave her a sense of security— yet was screaming inside for freedom and more creative expression.

It felt as though M was almost justifying her marriage, her second marriage in her letter to Jeffers.
“Our relationship had plenty of openness, but it posed certain difficulties too, natural challenges that had to be surmounted: bridges had to be built and tunnels board, to get across to one another out of what was pre-formed. The second place was one such bridge, and Tony’s silence ran undisputed beneath it like a river”.

“One night, when Tony and I were going to bed, I flew at him in a rage and said all kinds of terrible things, about how lonely and washed up I felt, about how he never gave me any real attention of the kind that makes a woman feel like a woman and just expected me to sort I’ve gave birth to myself all the time, like Venus out of a seashell. As if I knew anything about what makes a woman feel like a woman!”

Soon after, M’s outburst to Tony she feels guilty. She feels rotten for saying those terrible things and knows he has never done anything to hurt her.
M knows that she married a stable man— she also knows the there are differences between the artist L was and her more ordinary kind husband.
M valued the security from Tony...but craved freedom and artistic fantastical electricity.

We meet M’s daughter, Justine and her boyfriend, Kurt. They come for a visit and move into the main house.
At the same time, M’s artistic/ painter friend, L, the painter she met years ago while in Paris during her first marriage, comes to stay in the guest house.
M had a long interest in L— call it an obsession or artistic infatuation.
She had a particular rapport with his work: his paintings of darkness with a tad of color. .. as she did ‘him’.

M was still writing Jeffers....
“One at the difficulties, Jeffers, in telling what happened is that the telling comes after the fact. This might sound so obvious as to be imbecilic, but I often think there’s just as much to be said about what you ‘thought’ would happen as about what actually did”.

Things didn’t go as planned ....
It’s an interesting ‘group’ visit....
with M’s inner voice examining herself, her marriage, motherhood, compromises, and disappointments....
but....nonetheless...M has a type of transformational shift. She came to see through the illusion of personal feelings.
“I hope I have become, or am becoming, a clear channel”.

“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. Do you think so, Jeffers?”

Jeffers, by the way was a poet — and a friend of D.H. Lawrence.
“Second Place” was inspired by real set of circumstances.

Rachel’s writing is speculative...pensive...
melancholic...unsettling....
sinister...
always ‘thought provoking’....leaving me with many of my own thoughts to ponder.
I love Rachel Cusk’s work.

Thank you Netgalley, Farrar, Straus, and Giroix

“High-class pseudo-philsophical hocus-pocus”

thundered Aldous Hxuley in 1933 while reviewing Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos. This was her epistolary account of DH Lawrence’s time in the New Mexico town in the 1920s, with his wife Frieda, at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s invitation.

Published two years after his death and ostensibly about the famed author, The New York Times Book Review in 1932 described it as “a puzzling book … more of a revelation of Mrs Luhan than of Lawrence.”

She had hoped that Lawrence would capture Taos, and the local Pueblo community, in the same way as his Sea and Sardinia: “Here is the only one who can really see this Taos country and the Indians, and who can describe it so that it is as much alive between the covers of a book as it is in reality.”

But his output failed to meet her expectations and they ultimately parted on bad terms, with DH Lawrence criticising her in his literary output and her verdict on him at the end of her book:

“Well Jeffers. That is all I have to tell you about Lorenzo in Taos. I called him there, but he did not do what I called him to do. He did another thing”

Why “Jeffers”? Well, much of Lorenzo in Taos was in the form of correspondence with a poet Robinson Jeffers, who she hoped might deliver where Lawrence didn’t. The preface to Lorenzo in Taos begins:

“Dear Jeffers —

This book tries to show you how we felt and acted some years ago.

When Frieda read it, she wrote me: “But Lorenzo was not like that any more. Taos changed him…”
I told her that I could only tell in these pages how we all were then, that I had lived through the time we passed together here and recorded it, and so this recollection is only of the painful days that brought about changes in us all, and not of the change itself.”

Rachel Cusk’s Second Place takes Lorenzo in Taos as an explicit inspiration.

Her first person narrator M. is an author who lives with her second husband Tony in a house on the salt marshes (presumably inspired by, but far more remote, than Cusk’s own property in Norfolk.

Earlier, while married to her first husband, she encounterd the work of the artist L. on a trip to Paris. This was a transformative experience but one that was first to bring her to a lowpoint in her life, including a incident on the journey back:

<i>I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting, the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life. It was like a contamination, Jeffers: it got into everything and turned it bad.</i>

Many years later M. invites L. to their house in the belief (like Mabel Dodge Luhan with DH Lawrence) that he will, uniquely, be able to capture the essence of the surrounding marshes.

He eventually comes, after an epoch defining but unspecified event (which causes both markets to crash, and restricts international travel). And as with Lorenzo in Laos, things don’t pan out as the hostess expects, but it is nevertheless a transformative experience for all concerned.

The novel would, I suspect, benefit from a close reading alongside Lorenzo in Taos as there are many more parallels than just the basic setting. Most obviously, the novel is addressed to a poet called Jeffers but some others I spotted:

- M’s husband Tony is unsure of his origins, even his ethnicity:

<i>His parents didn’t tell him he was adopted, and no one else ever referred to it, and since they lived a life of considerable isolation he says it wasn’t until he was eleven or twelve that he worked out what it meant that he was a different colour to them! I have seen photographs of Native Americans, and more than anything he looks like one of them.</i>

- Mabel Dodge Luhan’s fourth husband was called Tony Luhan and was a Native American.

- M’s first impression of L’s female companion Brett is that she has the “mouth of a comic-book gunman” - Mabel Dodge Luhan’s first impression of DH Lawrence’s wife was that she had “‘a mouth like a gunman.”

- Brett’s name is inspired by the painter Dorothy Brett, another member of the Laos community, a rival for DH Lawrence’s attention and the subject of much opprobrium in the pages of Lorenzo in Taos.

- DH Lawrence criticised Mabel Dodge Luhan for wearing loose fitting clothes - when L. eventually agrees to let M. sit for him, he tells her to wear something that fits.

- DH Lawrence disliked a chair gifted to him by Mabel Dodge Lulan, calling it the “iron maiden”. L and Brett refer to a similar item as “the electric chair.”

- DH Lawrence painted the cabin that the Luhan’s provided him in garish colours, including to their horror, a green snake wrapped around a sunflower. L and Brett paint a mural in M and Tony’s cabin with a snake wrapped around a tree trunk at its centrepiece.

As for the book itself, well high-class pseudo-philsophical hocus-pocus would be very harsh, as it has some deep psychological insights, although at times (more my failing) I wasn’t sure I grasped the logic of the sentiments being expressed.

Two striking passages on artists and people which certainly need a re-read:

<i>One has to serve out one’s changes moderately, like strong wine. I had very little awareness of such things in my existence before Tony: I had no idea at all why things turned out the way they did, why I felt gorged with sensation at one minute and starved of it the next, where my loneliness or joy came from, which choices were beneficial and which deleterious to my health and happiness, why I did things I didn’t want to do and couldn’t do what I wanted. Least of all did I understand what freedom was and how I could attain it. I thought it was a mere unbuttoning, a release, where in fact– as you know well– it is the dividend yielded by an unrelenting obedience to and mastery of the laws of creation. The rigorously trained fingers of the concert pianist are freer than the enslaved heart of the music-lover can ever be. I suppose this explains why great artists can be such dreadful and disappointing people. Life rarely offers sufficient time or opportunity to be free in more than one way.</i>

and

<i>Painting people, he said eventually, was an act of both scrutiny and idolatry in which– for him, at least– the coldness of separation had to be maintained at all costs. For this reason he had always been especially disturbed by artists who painted their children. When people fall in love, he said, they experience this coldness as the greatest frisson of all, the fascination of a subject that can still be seen as distinct from oneself. The more familiar the loved one becomes, the less that frisson can be obtained. Worship, in other words, comes before knowledge, and in life this represents the complete initial loss or abandonment of objectivity, followed by a good long dose of reality while the truth is revealed. A portrait is more like an act of promiscuity, he said, in which coldness and desire coexist to the end, and it requires a certain hard-heartedness, which was why he had thought it was the right direction for him to take at this moment. Whatever promiscuity he had indulged in in his younger years, he had been fooling himself, because the hardening of his heart with age was of a different magnitude. The quality that attracted him now was unavailability, the deep moral unavailability of certain people, so that to have them was in effect to steal them and violate– or at least experience– their untouchability.</i>

But this is ultimately a fascinating read, a departure from the Faye trilogy, but no less successful and, as Cusk says in her afterword, a tribute to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s spirit, and, in my view, a wonderfully creative one.

Recommended. 4.5 stars and a strong prize contender.

This book is a real turn for fans of Cusk who are used to her autofiction and plain, spare style. I noticed right away the abundant use of exclamation marks, and the strangeness of the voice. It seems to be an act of literary ventriloquism -- the novel is a monologue and it involves a woman who invites a DH Lawrence stand=in to her residency. I would consider this a very strange and peculiar book, unlike anything she's written.

Rachel Cusk’s latest novel is inspired by “Lorenzo in Taos” – the American art patron Mable Dodge Luhan’s account of a rather fraught (on both sides) visit to her New Mexican literary colony by DH Lawrence and his wife in 1922.

This novel is narrated as a first person recollection by “M” to an unknown (to us) recipient – Jeffers. The book starts with M describing a rather series of events in Paris when she was in her first marriage – events which occur immediately prior to a train journey where she meets the Devil with unspecified but catastrophic consequences for her life. After an evening spent flirting unsuccessfully with a famous writer, she comes across a gallery exhibiting paintings by an artist L which, particularly the landscapes (as well as a portrait of an unknown woman), somehow speak to her at a profound level.

15 years later M is living with her easy-going second husband Tony in a property on a coastal marsh where they have discovered and renovated a cottage (the eponymous second home) which they use as a place for visiting artists to work. The marsh has the same effect on M as L’s landscapes and she writes to the now extremely successful L (via a mutual acquaintance) inviting him to stay with them. Initially he demurs and stays with some of his wealthy patrons – but an unspecified catastrophe (which both leads to an asset price collapse – including L’s own property and his paintings – and travel restrictions) leads him to accept.

Most of the book tells of L’s stay – which decidedly does not go to M’s plans. She seems convinced first of all that L will form a bond with her (and perhaps see her as a muse if not lover) and, more so, that the marsh landscape will inspire his work, and his painting somehow express what the marshland means to M. In practice this aim is frustrated both by: L’s aloof and unfeeling character - with an attitude to L which seems equal parts pity, contempt and dismissal); and by the presence of others – L comes with a young British companion in tow, the preposterously accomplished (for her age) Brett, and the circumstances lead to M’s adult daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt (a rather absurdly confident character who one day decides to knock up a fantasy novel unwittingly plagiarised from one he has read) to stay also. From then on the book examines the dynamics between the group – but always filtered through M’s obsession with her original intentions for L’s visit.

The themes explored by Cusk through M are many and include but are far from limited to :

Motherhood and marriage (and ideas in both of identity, sacrifice, obliteration, communication, evolution of roles and the loss that comes with it, freedom and obligation)l

Privilege (in many forms – sex, age, wealth and status)

Art (its relationship to reality, the workings of the art world, how we view art and how it can both reflect, magnify and alter our thoughts, the necessary character to be a successful artist and its implications for other aspects of the artists life and relationships

As one would expect with Cusk – this is a deep and quotable book, one which teeters somewhere – like much of her writing - on the cusp of genius and pretentiousness

It also has (to quote an early Hilary Mantel view of Cusk’s work) her “bracing mix of scorn and compassion” – in fact M says something similar of L’s work

"part of L’s greatness lay in his ability to be right about the things that he saw, and what confounded me was how, at the plane of living, this rightness could be so discordant and cruel."

And this of course leads to another element of Cusk’s writing – its use of auto-fiction, its idea of telling a story ostensibly about others but at least partly (if not largely) about the story teller – something which is true of Cusk’s narrators (most famously in her annihilated perspective of the Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy) but also of Cusk herself.

Fans of Cusk’s autofictional approach will not be disappointed here - and there are lots of these references.

One, I think, of the key themes of the book is how male artists get away with being self-absorbed, abrasive and arrogant in a way never possible for a woman (and of female complicity in this). One might say how does Ms Cusk get pilloried on MumsNet while Mr. Self appears on Shooting Stars

The very marshland setting of the novel is of course a nod to Rachel Cusk and her second husband’s own stunning property in the North Norfolk saltmarsh village of Stiffkey (pronounced of course Stookey) and I was of course reminded of various snarky tweets by literary figures that I saw when that house was put on the market last year by this observation by L

"‘Who pays for all this?’ he asked. ‘The house and the land belong to Tony. I have some money of my own.’ ‘I can’t imagine your little books make all that much.’"

Fans of Cusk will also know that all her books feature a dog – even though she herself has never owned one (and is allergic to them) and her rather deliciously there is a whole section around a non-dog used to summarise M’s troubled and complex relationship to her husband and daughter.

My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC via NetGalley.

As I was reading "Second Place," I kept texting my impressions to a friend who shares my conflicted relationship with Cusk. By conflicted, I mean we are both big fans of her writing, but are also cognizant of the fact that her cerebral style can make for an at times claustrophobic reading experience. That being said, one of my fleeting observations about the book was that Cusk reminds me of Virginia Woolf, in that she clearly found the conventions of writing fiction to be too restricting, decided that she was not going to follow them and moved on to produce literature that inspires in me that sort of buoyant awareness that you truly can do anything with words, as long as you do it well.

I think Woolf is a particularly apt comparison in this case. There is something of Mrs. Ramsay in our narrator M. Not personality-wise. Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay is portrayed as docile, maternal and the person everyone instinctively turns to when they require comfort. M., the mysterious narrator of Cusk's "Second Place," is nothing of the sort. Her relationship to other people is marred by fear, the fear of what other people's lives, characters and impressions will reveal about the insufficiency of hers. Nevertheless, like "To the Lighthouse," M. has reunited in the lonely and semi-secluded corner where she lives with her husband Tony, an idiosyncratic group of characters: her young daughter and her unbelievable partner Kurt (the butt of many jokes) and a semi-famous painter called simply L., whom she invited despite having never met him. L. arrives to take residence in the "second place" accompanied by a much younger woman, Brett.

M.'s obsession with L. had me almost pulling my hair out on several occasions. As a reader, I found L. to be a mediocre man, with some measure of success that had less to do with his skill as a painter and more with his ability to leech of much richer people. He seemed petty, mean, downright unpleasant in the few moments that we were able to see him through his words or through the perceptions that other characters had of him. And yet, M. seems to yearn of his approval. She is certain that L. is a kindred soul whose affirmation and mind would be able to enliven her own. Now, I think it's pretty understandable that I felt like yelling at M. for being so taken with this guy who seemed to despise and not respect her. How could she not see that she had been the one to give him a measure of importance and not the other way around?

Except, that this precisely the point. There is no way for me to come to that conclusion, for my anger to be aroused, if it weren't for the fact that M. is smart, deeply aware of the gendered dynamics of their relationship and yet completely unable to step back and analyze this side of it. So, kudos to you Rachel Cusk. You win, I guess.

Still, while I understand the importance of L., I think the book shines when M. is in conversation with the other guests and characters, especially her daughter and Brett. There is this particularly lovely moment (that again reminded me of the "Time Passes" section of "To The Lighthouse") where M. sees how her daughter is changing in response to Brett's presence and how bittersweet it is for her to see others change while she remains the same, while also contemplating the importance of her as a spectator to notice all of this, to affirm its existence through her status as an outsider.

There are plenty of delightful, meta, philosophical moments like this. You can't read "Second Place" like you would any other novel. I read it more like a book about literary theory, taking copious notes throughout. There is so much here about perception, fate, objectivity, and language. It feels more like a treatise about these three things than a simple piece of fiction. It's incredibly smart and poignant and curse you Rachel Cusk for changing my mind so many times. You truly are something else.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the early ebook. Many years ago a young woman looks into the window of an art gallery and the paintings she sees affect her as almost nothing else has to this point. Now middle aged, the woman lives in an a remote area with her hard working and taciturn second husband. The woman convinces the artist to visit her where he can work in a smaller, separate house. She wants the artist to herself, but her husband is there and her young daughter is visiting with her new husband and the artist himself has brought a young woman with him. When the woman and the artist finally do get a few moments alone, it turns out the artist despises her and wants to destroy her mentally. The visit becomes this huge battle of wills whenever the two meet. This is such a smart book about a woman who gets turned inside out as she studies this arrogant artist and eventually examines herself as maybe she never has before.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk has piqued my interest immediately after I read the premise which sounded fabulous. No surprise that the book has not disappointed me – as in other Cusk’s works, in Second Place Cusk plays with language and with our expectations. Second Place has both similarities and differences when compared with Outline trilogy, as it digs deep into the psyche, yet Second Place has an active and introspective narrator. Our narrator M invites L, a prominent painter, to stay in her guesthouse during strange times that might be Covid. Not going into too many details, the reader gets a chance to receive some spot-on observations on art and human relationships, as well as to experience the messiness of life while reading. I must confess that I do prefer Cusk’s Outline trilogy over Second Place as Second Place lacked some vividness to my teste and is less accessible than Outline, but still – it’s a great read for those craving to delve into a very smart piece of work.

3.5, rounded down. Cusk is an extremely talented writer, with impeccably precise command of her own unmistakable style, and an unflinchingly honest and critical perspective on life, art, and gender. But this wasn't quite on the same level as her [book:Outline trilogy|40942732], which had a sense of flow and ease that Second Place lacks. This is also a much more challenging read, and I think I might enjoy it more on a re-read.

Instead of a narrator who's passively listening to other people's self-absorbed narratives, Second Place is unreliably narrated by M, a middle-aged occasional writer whose thought processes are convoluted and aberrant. M is obsessed with L, a famous male painter, whom she invites to stay in her guesthouse (the second place) in what is probably the coast of East Anglia, during a global economic crisis that might be Covid. But the outside world barely intrudes upon M's consciousness and the emotional lives of the other characters, who are more archetypes than psychologically believable human beings.

The awkwardly-paced action follows the increasing disruptions that L and his girlfriend/muse impose upon M's family, which includes her saintly/earthly farmer husband, her millennial daughter from her first marriage, and the daughter's pretentious/ambitious Berliner boyfriend. But this isn't much of a chamber opera, because M has so little insight into the emotions and motivations of the others, and is blinded by obsession and self-absorption that becomes suffocating.

Along the way, M articulates some unforgettable mini-essays about motherhood and sexuality, and deftly probes the tangled relationship between art and life, unreality and reality. But even a short stay in this cramped guest cottage didn't give me room to breathe.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

In this short novel, addressed to a character named Jeffers, a first-person narrator only known as M invites an artist named L. to the coastal home and artists retreat that she owns with her second husband. This happens against the background of what might be a pandemic or an economic collapse that leaves people unable to travel, unless they have some form of private transport. Her own daughter and the daughter's boyfriend have both returned to stay because they've lost their jobs in the unspecified crisis. The artist, whose work had inspired her to leave her first marriage years earlier, turns up with his much younger girlfriend/companion. M's spiritual and romantic expectations of his visit are upended, as everyone pairs up in different and unexpected ways, and her need for drama is visited on her second, largely unexamined marriage...

Second Place, appropriately, is somewhere between Rachel Cusk's novelly novels and formally experimental Outline trilogy. Like all Cusk, it's compulsively readable while offering sharp, incisive, revelations of character that seem to have been forged from some horrendous personal fires. There is a definite structure, but it's used largely to hang the author's ideas about freedom, femininity, motherhood, making art, and personality. The characters have an air of unreality (which is sometimes intentionally funny - Brett, L's companion, happens to have a ridiculous number of chronologically unfeasible accomplishments, while Kurt, M's daughter's boyfriend, seems to have been created to have a sly dig at a certain kind of writer). I'd say that this was similar to Transit in some ways - with the hysteria of the end-sequence of the children's party- but the coastal isolation and the unspecified global event add a sense of timelessness to the story.

Unreality - another theme - is a dangerous word to mention in relation to Cusk's work because I'm sure it has a distinct meaning that I didn't get. My reading of it - as I read - was that L. represented a kind of (distinctly male) artistic freedom from the self that is near-impossible especially if you're not an artist (of any gender), but also implicated in many other relationships. M. is brittle and full of pain, conscious of her failings and dependencies, and more so as her life with her husband is so stable. She thinks that L. embodies that freedom, but actually it's his work and the ability to create that effect that enraptures her. She invites him essentially because she wants to see the landscape through his eyes. When she sees his paintings, as a young mother in a difficult marriage, she thinks: '...there's something that paintings and other created objects can do to give you relief. They give you a location, a place to be, when the rest of the time the space has been taken up because the criticism got there first...' In contrast, L.'s work finds the words for her feelings: 'The paintings found them, somewhere inside me. I don't know who they belonged to, or even who spoke them - just that they were spoken'. This is a very simple reading - I have no doubt that I will go back and re-read this book at least once more.

It is endlessly quotable, some examples (with the proviso this is a galley and they may change):

'Life rarely offers sufficient time or opportunity to be free in more than one way'

'I wonder what it feels like, to adopt a child and then prefer it to one's own. It seems, somehow, completely understandable'.

'The wounded don't survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival, and how can she be just subject to revelation after that?'

On parenting - 'I have often considered the survival of paintings, and what it is means for our civilisation that an image has survived across time undamaged, and something of the morality of that survival - the survival of the original - pertains, I believe, to the custody of human souls too'.

Although it's not necessary, it might also be fun/enlightening to read Lorenzo in Taos, by Mabel Dodge Luhan - Cusk notes in the afterword that she owes a debt to the book, an account of D.H. Lawrence coming to stay with the writer.

3.5 rounded down

Cusk's latest literary offering Second Place felt more of a challenging read than her other fiction (specifically the Outline Trilogy), although this is not to say it is a book without many merits, and I expect it is one I would get more out of on a re-read.

The setting is an unnamed isolated coastal region (which I took to be in the UK) during the 2020 lockdown. Our narrator, M, invites a famous artist, L, to stay at the "second place", a renovated cottage on her property which she allows friends and contemporaries to stay in, to work on his painting. M encountered L's work in Paris, and is desperate to get closer to him. After turning down her invite initially, L shows up... but his stay doesn't go quite as M predicted it. L brings a young woman, Brett, with him, and the cast of characters - M's husband, Tony, her adult daughter and her boyfriend - all have their lives impacted and upended by the visitors. Through this setting and cast of characters Cusk explores a number of themes, by retelling the events and her reaction to them to a character named Jeffers.

The postscript sets out that the book was inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir by Mabel Dodge Luhan about the time D H Lawrence stayed at her property in New Mexico in 1922, and one suspects it would be beneficial to read this book to gain an even greater insight into Second Place.

I wouldn't advise starting here if this is your first experience of Cusk's writing, but established fans will definitely find something to enjoy here.

There’s literary fiction and then there’s literary fiction and typed up this doesn’t have the same effect as when spoken aloud, so how do I describe the sort of self indulgent, preciously worded, overwrought and overwritten work like this? It’s certainly literary in that it goes a long way to showcase the powers and beauty of words and in its efforts to understand and elevate emotions and inner workings of the mind. But very consciously so, reading this book you are constantly aware of the author doing this, the stylistic linguistic tricks don’t disappear into the story, in fact it’s almost as if they use the story as a mere canvas to show themselves off against.
Which still might have worked had the story and its cast not been so fundamentally offputting. So let’s talk about that…there’s a very simple basic plot that involves a middle aged woman who has a nice comfortable wife and a lovely comfortable man to share it with who takes care of her financially and emotionally, but apparently not enough, so that she develops something of a crush on a famous artist and invites him to stay with them, on their property, in the second place they have built just for guests. It’s a sort of thing from a bygone era, when the wealthy got actively involved with the arts by sponsoring (in a way) the artists. And in fact, this is precisely what this book was inspired by Lawrence’s stay with a wealthy NY socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan at her Taos estate. Though one can only hope the real thing was way less convolutedly antagonistic than the fictional account.
L, the artist, known by the mere first initial, is from the get go a giant turd of a person, a precocious prick whose early found fame has apparently liberated him from all manners. At first he tosses the invitation aside, but eventually dire financial circumstances force him to reconsider and so he shows up, with a much younger woman in tow no less and expects to be doted on. And the protagonist of the novel is thrilled to do so. In fact, she relocates her own daughter and her milquetoast of a bf into the main building with her and her ever patient spouse, so that L and his lady might have the privacy they require.
From then on, it’s all about the screwed up group dynamics of this uneven and unpleasant situation. The protagonist never becomes likeable in her fawning adoration of the man who plainly wants nothing to do with her, but use her for her money. L never becomes…well, he doesn’t even come close to likeable, he remains a prick throughout, graduating from precocious to petulant and then descending into his own tragedy too profoundly to be rescued even by money. L’s lack of any semblance of gratitude is only ever as striking as the protagonist’s lack of need for it. She’s driven by something different, something less quantifiable and infinitely sadder.
In the end, they are both tragic in their own ways, though she manages to maintain her unevenly loving marriage as a safety net. L, to the very end, remains unworthy of attention or affection. The note in the end doesn’t do much to rectify that. And yes, I know, I know, it’s dangerous and possibly wrong to view fictional characters through the prism of one’s own morality, but it can’t be helped. We read as we are and as I am, I was appalled by this characters. And not all that enamored by the overdone writing either. There is, objectively, a certain beauty to it, but it’s too much of the same, most meaning and profundity wrapped up in so many words that it’s all but obscured. There are some interesting and well done meditations of the nature of relationships, marriage especially. But overall the affect is mostly muted but the thoroughly unpleasant story.
The book’s official description mentions female fate and male privilege, because of course that’s what you mention nowadays to sell books, but frankly the female in this book is the privileged one and the power games played between her and L have less to do with feminism and wokeness than they do with personal shortcomings of those two as people. The publishers have obviously tried to make the book fit into the contemporary hot button mold, but it’s nowhere near there.
In the end, I can’t remember the last time an obviously well written literary book has made me so angry. The look at me, look at me, look how clever I am with words thing it had going was just much too much. And who the f*ck is Jeffers? Why is the entire stupid thing addressed to Jeffers who never makes an appearance or is mentioned otherwise? Is it to justify the epistolary form? Is Jeffers the one who gets and enjoys this sort of thing? Well, good for Jeffers. I’m out of here. At least this book had the decency to be short. Definitely an acquired taste. Thanks Netgalley.

Second Place is much more accessible than what I’ve come to expect from Rachel Cusk, but I leave this novel, once again, feeling like I don’t perfectly understand what she’s trying to tell me. I will say that this is incredibly interesting: an interesting format (epistolary) that makes for interesting observations (on art, motherhood, the burdens of femininity, male freedom) while tracing out an interesting plot (which is, apparently, based loosely on real events in the lives of some famous artists). I was intensely interested throughout this entire short read and ended the experience feeling enriched; Cusk is a master at her craft and this is undeniably art.