That is the second book by Rachel Cusk that I read. I have to be honest, I picked the first one by it’s cover because aren’t the covers great?
I can’t say that I am a fan of the writing unfortunately. I wish I was because it is about interesting people and places but I feel like sometimes I’m following and sometimes I’m just not.
Her writing reminded me of the author Ali Smith in the sense that I feel like I’m missing the essence the story and the feeling behind it when I read their books.
I do recommend it because I feel like it would be someone’s cup of tea.
Thank you NetGalley, the publisher and author for letting me read an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I have loved Rachel Cusk’s other works. In some ways all of her hallmarks are in this latest offering. Her characterisations and the inner voice of her narrator is as crystal-clear and cleverly realised but I find that it has less impact with each volume that I read. I more “real” life to intrude on the gilded cages of the protagonists to shake them out of their introspection. Her consideration of gender on property and ownership is interesting and harks back to Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own but lingers too long on the manifold difficulties of the white, middle-class, with too little irony or self-awareness.

Second Place is another precise and beautifully constructed narrative but it reflects an extremely narrow perspective. As the characters are more limited that those presented by the chance meetings and conversations in the Outline trilogy this narrowness hems the novel in blunts its edges.

Obviously this was incredible, everything she writes is a masterpiece, I would read her shopping list and rate is 5 stars.
Stop fannying around, yes she's smart but so are you! pick up a a Cusk.

An ultimately enjoyable but sometimes difficult read. The author's spare style and dense prose made the reading experience laborious at times but the author's dry outlook and ability to dissect situations made it worth the effort.

Despite admiring Cusk as a writer, this novel was not for me. I found the voice distancing and I didn't care for any of the characters.

Rachel Cusk's light-touch prose still manages to express some of the most painful truths of women's self-esteem. A narrative of love and longing for it, as well as a rumination on society's relationship to art more broadly.

https://isobelbrown.com/2021/06/14/intriguing-hard-to-love/

I can't help feeling in awe of Rachel Cusk, which can stop you enjoying a book, sinking into its world and allowing it to envelop you. You keep stopping to admire the view. With the previous trilogy (Outline etc), I could do both. I was entranced by the narrative technique, the 'characters', the sophistication and accuracy of the language. </p>

In Second Place, I was puzzled. I had to read in short bursts. Partly, I would run out of interest, or become exasperated with the scatty, chatty, exclamation-mark-infested narration. Partly, the meal was too rich, there were too many hard-core, interesting, complex ideas about life and love to digest at once. And partly, also, I realised we were never going to know what had caused the mysterious breakdown in the narrator's psychic composure, her previous marriage, nor the identity of the person ('Jeffers') to whom all this book is apparently addressed.

Which was a bit annoying.

I couldn't relax into the voice of the book, it seemed at once elaborately sophisticated and at the same time clumsy, overworked. I thought 'Rachel Cusk writes better than this, doesn't she?'

Then I got to the acknowledgement at the end, about the book being inspired by Mabel Dodge's story. D H Lawrence. Mabel Dodge Luhan, the wealthy American lover of letters who, when the Lawrences got to New Mexico on their endless life-search for somewhere that Lawrence's poor health could handle, and somewhere that wasn't deathly and life-denying, kind of adopted him. And put up with Lawrence's glorious wife Frieda, smoking and sulking in the cabin while resplendent Mabel and deaf little Hon Dorothy Brett contorted themselves in worship of the great writer. Then everything in Second Place hung together, because I was aware of Rachel Cusk's admiration of D H Lawrence, and loved her for it, as his work and, I suppose you have to call it now, his value-system, is so unfashionable and I have always felt rather guilty about the way I love his writing and the force of the personality behind it.

So yes, a flawed and fascinating experiment, in my view, this 'Second Place', a title that describes both the locus of the book, a kind of guest or second home built near to the narrator's uncomfortable house on what feels like an Essex marshland, and the way the narrator feels about her role as a woman, a wife, a mother, a writer. Things happen. Her daughter and her awkward partner turn up and affect the dynamic between the narrator and her partner, a strong, silent, Lawrentian kind of 'Indian' fellow; but more importantly, an artist ('L' of course), turns up with an unexpected, glamorous girlfriend, takes over the Second Place and pokes at the difficulties and strains in the narrator's life and personality.

Always a worthwhile author to read, and I did feel a little worthy, finishing it, but try it and see.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and Faber for giving me a digital copy to read pre-publication.</p>

This novella is all told from one perspective, which might sound tedious, but is so cleverly done as to be the opposite.
Beautiful, sad, observant writing that peels away the top layer of life to expose the bones.
'Second Place' refers to a building/home in the novel but, I think, also refers to how the narrator has lived her life. Another Rachel Cusk literary fiction gem.

I got this on NetGalley, thank you.

A beautiful and illuminating novel. Not one for readers who want plot, plot, plot - this is a character study, and a very good one at that. I really enjoyed Cusk’s prose and point of view throughout.

An impressive example of literary fiction, Cusks talent in describing scenes and images shines throughout. The authors ability to create tense claustrophobic atmosphere is brilliant.

I was a huge fan of the Cusk Trilogy and this book went beyond those for me. It felt like I was highlighting every single sentence. The ones that didn’t say a lot were so beautifully phrased and then the ones that said more would leave you thinking about them long after you read the book.

With chapters about her previous love, previous home, characteristics she used to have, this book has a lot of seconds. The lead character feels like she’s coming second place in life. This is a poignant look into how we are as a society and watch her come to the realisation that you can’t come second place in a race against yourself.

Big Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

The Second Place is an interesting exploration of female identity and how relationships influence the narrator's sense of worth. The narrative told in conversation to an individual named Jeffers is a clever way to verbalise what is effectively an interior monologue.
The domestic setting and the rural setting of the story compresses the interaction between the narrator, her husband and the enigmatic painter to reveal the true colours of the actors involved. Read at surface level The Second Place is a pleasant anecdotal exploration of womanhood, but the deeper minded may find a more involved understanding. Worthy of a second read, but not for everyone.

I am a huge fan of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (well, isn’t everyone?) and of course I was slightly apprehensive that this standalone novel wouldn’t live up to my sky high expectations. I am pleased to say that my fears proved to be unfounded and I will go as far as to say that this will undoubtedly rank in my top ten of 2021! Cusk’s writing is unparalleled and she is certainly one of the best literary fiction writers working today. I was unfamiliar with the Mabel Dodge Luhan memoir it was inspired by, and I will try to seek it out. To conclude, I doubt many, if any, literary novels will better Second Place this year.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this novel.

I have been reading Cusk’s novels since her first two novels, so I have absorbed the development of her style as and when it’s happened (including her non-fiction). I enjoyed the Trilogy, when I wasn’t entirely sure that I would, finding them absorbing. However, I tried to like Second Place, I even understood what it was trying to do, but I just didn’t like it, although I respect it as a piece of writing and it makes sense as a novel that follows the Trilogy.

The Second Place of the title explicitly refers to the building that the main character M and her husband Tony have built on their isolated land, but as the narrative unfolds it is clear that M throughout her life is in second place to other people and circumstances.

The irony here is that the narrative is in the form of M telling a character Jeffers about an artist L staying at the second place, and Jeffers’s own voice is never heard, so it is simply a +200 page soliloquy, a stranglehold on the story with a captive audience.

As other reviewers have noted, none of the characters is particularly sympathetic, excepting perhaps Tony, but don’t do anything especially objectionable so it is hard to dislike them. In the crudest terms, it is middle-class people banging on. Some other reviewers have got a lot out of this novel, and, again, I understand this, but I do not think that I was in the right headspace to get as much out of it as I should.

Despite all this, I will read this again one day, as I know that it missed its point with me and I need to give this novel the chance that it deserves.

An excellent novel that delves deep into the psyche of the characters.
Second Place is narrated by M, who invites a celebrated painter, L, to stay at her marshland home. We don’t know where her marshland home is but we know that she lives there with her husband Tony and their 21 year old daughter Justine. M feels connected to L after viewing his artwork and hopes to get to know him better; however, things don’t quite go to plan when L arrives with Brett, an aggravating heiress who crosses social boundaries and annoys M by taking Justine under her wing giving her tips on her appearance.
L turns out to be an awful self centred character who shows indifference to M and chooses to paint a portrait of Tony. Added to the mix is Justine’s boyfriend a writer with little talent or originality. So with the characters in place there is much drama with plenty of social comedy as the characters rub along and rub each other up the wrong way and M finds she both admires and loathes L.
An endnote details the idea for the novel owes a debt to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos, about DH Lawrence’s stay at her artists’ colony in New Mexico. Although L becomes a painter in Second Place.
Rachel Cusk’s writing is exquisite and there is much under the surface in this novel that makes it a joy to read.

I have mixed feelings about Rachel Cusk’s work. Her books are brilliantly written, firing astute observations that rapidly tear apart all layers of pretence and politeness overlaying human interactions and then rebuilding them back into their crooked honest forms, which she does to exceptional polish here. Yet there is also a bitterness in her writing that leaves a funny aftertaste. ⁣
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Second Place is about a middle aged woman living in a remote marshland in a place that feels like the end of the world. She invites a male artist battered by the ugliness of age and his loss of virility and success, to live in her second place. This quickly dissolves into a power struggle - she hopes he will paint her and so render her seen, he is intent on avoiding and then destroying her. The remoteness of their location unleashes a brutality that hides its face in civilisation. In the quiet tumult of this struggle, ugliness is uncovered as the narrator realises that ‘my whole life, which appeared to have been built on love and freedom of choice, was in fact a facade that concealed the most craven selfishness’. ⁣
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Cusk is always especially fantastic at writing about motherhood and womanhood, and doing so with a dark humour. When the narrator’s daughter is left by her boyfriend, she tells her ‘she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by’. She looks at the man and says ‘Kurt wasn’t weak: men never are. Some of them admit their strength and use it to the good, and some of them are able to make their will to power seem attractive, and some of them resort to deception and connivance to manage a selfishness of which they are themselves somewhat frightened.’ ⁣
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#RachelCusk #SecondPlace

An extraordinary, precisely-written and thought-provoking novel that examines the nature of art, our relationship to it and with other people, and the dangers of externalising the ego. This is my first Cusk and I will certainly be picking up the Outline trilogy next.

What an exquisitely written little novel. Cusk has excellent command of language, breathing life into the pages and characters. She really set the gold standard for language and prose.

At the center of the novel is the ‘Second Place’, a property that the narrator (who we know as M) and her husband Tony like to invite artists to to create and to use the marsh as inspiration for their work. Having made a deep connection to the painter L’s work in Paris years earlier, M invites the artist to take up residence in the Second Place in the hopes of finding something in him that she is looking for, maybe some sort of validation or discovery of a deep, hidden part of herself. L eventually becomes her guest and we see M grapple with L’s character and outlook on life which stand in contrast to her own desires, responsibilities and her past: “But I had already understood that this was to be the keynote of my dealings with him, this balking of my will and of my vision of events, the wresting from me of control in the most intimate transactions, not by any deliberate act of sabotage on his part but by virtue of the simple fact that he himself could not be controlled”. Anyone who ever went into something with great expectations and was disappointed will relate to M in Second Place.

In contrast to some of Cusk’s earlier work (I’m thinking specifically of the Outline trilogy) in which the reader is removed from the narrator, in Second Place M lets us into her life and mind, we learn what makes her ‘tick’. The reader pretty much lives in her head as much as she lives by the Second Place.

Now a little about what irked me about the book (thankfully not much). 1. What is the meaning of her seeing the Devil on the train in the beginning? If it had any deeper meaning it was lost on me. 2. I wish we had learned more about Jeffers, I wanted to know why she told this story specifically to them, what is their connection to M?

I admire Rachel Cusk’s work enormously but for me, Second Place, didn’t reach the high bar of her previous novels. In the ‘Outline’ series there’s a precision and a searing self examination that drives the narrative, even when there doesn’t seem to be one. In this, I kept waiting for the book to start. She does write beautifully with a spare and always elegant prose. I recommend many of her books but not, in this instance, this one.

Following up on her 'Outline' trilogy is no easy feat for Rachel Cusk, but 'Second Place' managed to capture my attention and left me devouring it over the course of two sittings. Where the 'Outline' trilogy was occasionally critiqued for being plotless of episodic, 'Second Place' serves as a domestic novel that explores issues of relationships, freedom, and art, to name a few themes. Cusk identifies the ways in which motherhood can be fulfilling and restricting. I loved slipping into the form of the novel, the letters exchanged and the musings on contemporary life. I'd have no hesitation recommending this book to anyone that enjoys texts that question and interrogate life's big questions through exploring identity, art and freedom. I enjoyed coming to it with Rachel Cusk's previous books in mind but it would be equally enjoyable as your first Cusk novel.