‘Nothing evil ever dies. Especially not of remorse.’

Second Place is a very strange little novel. To describe the premise or plot gives very little idea of the its unnerving effect. ‘A famous artist comes to stay’ tells you everything and nothing.

The title has a dual meaning. It refers to the narrator M.’s guest house on her isolated rural property—‘our second place’—where the artist L. is invited to live. But it also means subordination: to come in second place is to be second best, inferior. This feeling is something M. struggles with throughout the story.

M. is highly strung, anxious, perhaps even narcissistic, and her narration wavers between philosophy and aggressive self-psychoanalysis. Upon arrival, L. falls far short of expectations. The two are instantly at odds, a pair of magnetic poles that can’t help but repel one another.

This novel is an exercise in tone, tension, and a creeping menace that holds throughout but doesn’t deliver any hammer blows. It takes time to get to know M. and where she is coming from; as you do, her pronouncements about identity, freedom, and creative endeavour take on greater potency.

The enduring image of the book for me is that of the second place’s floor-to-ceiling windows: a cold, glassy partition—a portal that allows observation but not participation. Similarly, Second Place is intellectually engaging rather than immersive. 4 stars.

This is another masterful book by Rachel Cusk. A brilliant novel about art, desire, mortality, being destroyed by another person. The plot follows the narrator who offers the "second place" or guest house on her property to the difficult and mysterious painter L. His arrival has disastrous effects on the narrator, her husband, daughter, as well as the daughter's partner. The book almost felt play-like, with the story taking place in one secluded setting, and the tensions between a small cast of characters. The book is filled with small moments of observation, some really funny scenes, as well as disturbing ones. I was drawn to Cusk's exploration of the expectations we place on others, and their failure to ever live up to the idea of them we have in our heads. The narrator wants her life to be changed, and almost summons L into it, seeking the destructive role that he offers, even as she acknowledges the fantasy she has of him can never live up to the reality that he is a sad, ornery old man. The epistolary form is also unusual as the whole story is told through the narrator's letter to a friend Jeffers. Overall, this is a short, compelling novel, and the ending is absolutely stunning.

I loved this book. It's so considered, so carefully wrought, like something distilled and matured in a cellar whose journey to the light feels exciting, a little taboo.

It's the kind of book that a creative writing tutor would tell you to avoid writing because it is exceedingly expositional - the whole thing written as if spoken to a person called Jeffers who we never meet and know very little about other than that he is a moralist. The fact this exposition works just makes it more appealing to read.

The book opens with a description of running from the devil on a train, a devil who is fiddling with a little girl. Everyone is ignoring him and what he's doing. The protagonist tries to ignore him too, but everywhere she runs she finds him sat opposite her again. This beginning, which comes after the triggering moment of discovering L's paintings when staying in Paris, is never fully explained but seems to express something of what it means to see and not act, to be aware of something bad taking place but to seek to avoid looking at and to avoid doing anything about it. There is a comment on our society here.

The novel is about the protagonist describing her journey with these paintings of L's and her journey towards him as an artist and a person. At the time she first sees his paintings she is unhappily married. By the time she meets him, invites him to stay in her second house just a short walk from her own, which she and her new partner call the Second Place, she is living happily, at least in a more fulfilled way than before though the Second Place is the thing that is meant to complete her happiness by providing a place for her interests in art, music and literature to visit her. This place, literally excavated from the marshland she lives in, complete with abandoned boat and car, is offered as a retreat to artists who might need it and who in return offer our protagonist culture and stimulation, even though her daughter thinks this house might have been renovated for her...

L's paintings first attracted her because they held a quality of memory; they remind her that she exists. L's visit is provocative and stimulating, but not necessarily in ways she could have predicted.

As she says near the beginning of her account:

'It's so easy to think you don't matter all that much at the very moment when your moral duty as a self is most exposed.'

How does an intellectual life marry with a domestic one? How does one love one's family and develop one's art? How do we hold on to what we love most? Second Place asks all of these questions and more.

A delightfully compelling read, Second Place is such a playful novel I found myself wanting to quote huge passages of it. Here is one last little snippet:

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

Yes, it is Rachel Cusk so it is very middle class, but that doesn't stop it from being a fascinating and exceedingly accomplished read. The protagonist's long-suffering second partner suggests that Cusk herself understands this classist criticism and uses it to mock herself, just a little. Even if you hated the characters, it would be hard not to be provoked by this novel and provoked in interesting ways.

“There is no particular reason, on the surface, why L’s work should summon a woman like me … a young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallised in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke… This aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and our human experience and that as women we grow accustomed to translating it into something we ourselves can recognise… the emotion I felt was pity, pity for myself and for all of us … I saw in other words that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state, which had truly been revealed to me before”

In the opening section of the book, M, a young woman whose marriage is in crisis, is walking around the streets of Paris when she starts following the signs to an art exhibition that have captured her attention. The experience is one of being confronted with a sense of impossible longing and unattainable desire, of being subjected to a domineering male presence and a gaze which is somehow quietly accepted and subsumed.
Years later she is living with her second husband -- and temporarily with her daughter and her boyfriend -- on vast grounds overlooking the coastal marsh, a setting that is like a landscape of the soul. The couple has turned a decayed structure into an annex, a second place that for the artistic-minded M functions as a home for “the higher things… that I had come to know and care about” (and that are lacking in her marriage with Tony), such as the notion of art, and where they invite artists. In this view M invites L, anticipating that they would share a communal view of the landscape, but the narrative she has told herself goes totally wrong as the arrival of the arrogant and self-entitled L wreaks havoc in this terrestrial paradise putting existing relations under strain.
Whereas in her trilogy she let the characters speak, here we also see M’s inner voice reconstructing and explaining the characters’s gaze, particularly L’s: a gaze which exposes her, casts her as an abhorrent, foolish, self-deluded, shapeless thing and trashes her expectations and the mental and physical edifices she has built, including her second place. What she had seen in his art initially has not been overcome.

As it is known, Cusk is a master of letting characters emerge through language and conversation. Here the focus is on M’s inner speech, her musings and quasi metanarrative interpretations of what is going on.
A lot in Second Place is about how M makes sense of the male gaze, how it is internalized, but also about female desire as taboo, and being “second place” as a woman, (starting from the names, with M coming after L.), with M knowing herself as a negative of something else, through other people’s negative criticism. Intertwined with this theme, the book offers plenty of opportunity to reflect on illusion, desire and the relationship to art (we see that portraits of women smudged and “effaced by desire”, “extinguished by L’s desire”. I found the way all this and L’s self-entitlement take on a physical, spatial quality really intriguing.

Second Place is also an interesting study on the fragility of the identities we build and stories we tell ourselves as well as the unreliability of plot and character vis a vis the mess that is life -- all delivered though a narrator that manages to be unreliable and rigorous and unflinching at the same time. There is a tension in the book that pushes you to turn the pages, and the quality of the writing is superb, crystal clear, though at times the reflection felt cumbersome and too intellectualized as “caught between the lecture hall and the analyst’s couch” (as A. Cummins has put it in his 2/5/21 article in the Observer).

It is known that Cusk has taken inspiration from Mabel Dodge Luhan’s account of D.H. Lawrence’s visit to her place in Taos, New Mexico, with Jeffers, the addressee in the Cusk’s novel, being a reference to a poet friend of Luhan and Tony the name of Luhan’s Pueblo Indian husband. I find this connection does not really cast light on the novel.
4.5

I found the first few pages of this confusing and unsettling but once into the book, it was brilliant. Second Place was exquisitely written , in its descriptions of place and nature but more so in delineating relationships . I really enjoyed the voice of M, the the device of her speaking to a character, Jeffers, about whom we know nothing. A very intelligent, thought provoking and in places wryly humorous book.

Rachel Cusk has a long history of asking the reader ‘how much of this is true? How much is my experience? Or are you just projecting all this onto an image of me?’ Whereas in Outline the authorial/autobiographical figure was only a listener, here the damaged writer M is an obsessively reflective and discursive narrator, sifting life’s events over and over for significance. If the narrator in Outline was present only indirectly, here everything is directly narrated by M in the form of a confessional to the undescribed listener Jeffers. After a brief prologue summarising a disastrous first marriage and a curtailed writing career, the story proper starts in a marshland retreat which M now shares with second husband Tony, returning adult daughter Justine, and Justine’s boyfried. Enter the apple-cart upsetter L, a famous painter who M. invites to stay. His arrival, with glamorous girlfriend Brett, to reside in the ‘second place’ - an annexe to their main house, prompts shifts in the power dynamics between the three couples.

The pleasures of this book are many: her sharp descriptions of the weather and landscape; and her focus on the idea of ‘second place’. In art L’s global art career is contrasted with M’s second-place literary endeavours. In relationships hers with the ‘ugly’ but kind Tony is set against L’s with the glamorous and sociable Brett. There’s even a generational ‘second place’ as M cedes ground to her grown-up daughter. The heart of the novel for me is this analysis of the human desire to compete,rate and place and how difficult it can be to create relationships not based on this. This, together with the quality of her prose, is reason enough to recommend this.

Both the start and the end are the weakest sections of the book, when another layer to the writing appears, that it is not autofiction at all but a rewriting of a book written by American socialite Mabel Luhan about DH Lawrence’s stay at an artists colony in New Mexico. At its best Cusk’s control of the characters and their interactions are strong enough for this to recede into the background as source material.

This book is such an excellent look at the sacrifices of motherhood and womanhood and personhood. I was enamoured by M’s marital relationship though I don’t know if I should have been. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time and recommend for fans of prose where reflections overtake narrative.

This novel is deceptively short and deceptively simple, luring you in with a series of letters from our narrator to a character we never quite meet.

The letters seem to get progressively desperate, confused and outraged, as we are led through a story where the characters and their relationships are stretched and made more tense.

Without spoiling it, there is a character whose spite and anger towards the end of the book feels visceral and quite unsettling, and it’s well handled.

My first book by Cusk, and, judging by this book, I doubt it’ll be my last.


I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was sent a copy of Second Place by Rachel Cusk to read and review by NetGalley. I chose to read and review this book because it sounded very intriguing having an artist at it’s core. Told in the first person by the main protagonist, the woman who invites the artist into her life and her home, to a friend as if in a letter or memoir. It is well written with a real sense of place, conjuring clear images of the remote and sometimes ethereal landscape. I can’t say that I actually liked any of the characters, and ultimately it read more like a dissertation or thesis on human psychology and behaviour than a novel. Did I enjoy reading this book? I’m not really sure, but am I glad I read it? I would have to say yes. If nothing else it was a great insight into why we may make some of the choices that we do in our lives and how we can sometimes allow ourselves to be manipulated.

In 1922, DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda came to stay with Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, New Mexico. Mabel, a patroness of art and culture often invited writers and artists to stay and promoted the beauty of the place. A decade later, she published Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir about the time DH spent with her in the form of letters between her, Lawrence and Frieda and her friend and poet Robinson Jeffers.

Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Second Place is “intended as a tribute to her spirit.” The novel’s protagonist, M encounters paintings by renowned artist L at a difficult time in her life. Years later, happier and settled with her second husband Tony in a coastal marshland, she starts corresponding with L and invites him to stay in second place, a cottage on their land where she often invites artists to stay, in the hope that L will see and paint the landscape in the way she sees and experiences it. Eventually, L agrees and arrives with his much younger friend Brett but this long hoped for visit doesn’t go the way M imagined. Also staying with M and Tony are her daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt. The narrative is in the form of long letters to M’s friend Jeffers about the time L spent at the second place.

This is a rich, challenging (in a good way) exploration of our relationship with art, how we see it and what it means to us, how artists create it. It is also about the art world, privilege and patronage, how artists are seen and sometimes coveted and what happens when the art world moves on. Another major theme is the self: self-knowledge and self-love, M’s identities as a mother and wife with specific responsibilities each of these identities brings and her need to be seen and understood for herself. The novel’s title, Second Place also brings to mind several meanings, some but not all gendered.

It is a short novel but I read it over several sittings in order to let it sink in. Highly quotable and thought provoking, it is a book I’ll return to now that I’ve looked into Mabel Dodge Luhan and Rachel Cusk (this was the first novel of hers I’ve read) and I can easily see new layers of meaning being revealed on subsequent readings. Highly recommended!

My thanks to Faber & Faber and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Second Place.

I loved this! I’m a massive Cusk fan, although I haven’t got through everything yet, but I’ve been reading her since university, and this is very much in the same excellent vein as her recent fiction. Second Place, about a couple who have an artist stay in their remote home with them, asks higher psychological questions - about art and love and parenthood - but also focuses on small everyday arguments between the characters, like whether they should get a dog or who should be responsible for work in the garden. The central question for me as a reader was who is the protagonist telling this tale to? She speaks directly to someone called Jeffers, but we never find out just who that is. I imagined that it’s the dog M might finally agree to buy with her partner Tony, but I enjoy a bit of mystery.

As her first novel since the (justifiably) highly praised "Faye" trilogy, Second Place has a lot to live up to. At first it seems a slighter and opaque novel, describing the visit of the artist L to the narrator, M, and her husband in an unspecified remote rural location. Like a less hysterical Thomas Bernhard novel, Second Place is addressed to the unspecified Jeffers and describes M's unlikely fascination with L. Often beautifully written in fluctuating registers that reflect the narrator's instability and lack of confidence, this is a powerful and sometimes moving account of living and writing It is also quite funny in places, for example when the narrator's self-importance is undermined: "[L] said I should try writing, because it was cheap and you didn't need any particular talent". Cusk has talent to burn.

I found this book a difficult read but one worth persevering with. It’s a beautifully written account of a woman’s experience when a famous painter comes to stay and very atmospheric with a rich internal landscape to match the external one. The style of writing is very formal and I found the constant references to ‘Jeffers’ the person she’s telling the story to very distracting and unnecessary. I felt it interrupted the flow of the conversational flow for me but obviously other readers might be fine with it.

By the time I started reading Second Place, I had forgotten anything of the description that had led me to request an advance proof copy so I went in blind. And I barely came up for air. I found it quite liberating to be reading without expectation, without assumptions. And the writing is so engrossing that I let myself be carried along on its conversational stream. The only thing that slowed my pace was the compunction to bookmark sparkling thoughts and sentences.
Told in the form of correspondence from M to the unseen Jeffers, it serves as a tribute to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of having D. H. Lawrence as a house guest. Here, the visitor L is an artist with whom M has no obvious link. It’s light on specifics: no full names and no spelling out of the location. There are only allusions to the pandemic by reference to limitations on travel.
This falls squarely into the category of books in which I am happy to read about people whose life (and inner life) is nothing like mine; I didn’t envy them but they fascinated me. Rachel Cusk has created a claustrophobic atmosphere amid the marshy big-sky landscape; a view is something that ‘looks back at you and incorporates itself in everything you do’. The characters interact with one another in a complex and often strained way. In M’s relationship with L we are shown that it is possible to not quite like someone but still be in thrall to them.
The number of bookmarks I added is an indication of how much I liked Second Place, how impressed I was by the writing. M says that ‘language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time.’ And here, for a short while, it did.

This was my first Rachel Cusk novel, and, as I've seen from other reviews, I probably should have read some of her other work first.

I have a love–hate relationship with the writing in this novel. On one hand, it reads like literary theory—more pretentious than not with long-winded sentences and words I seldom see in novels ("insofar" immediately takes me back to grad school, not reading for pleasure). On the other, it appears to be a candid, epistolary-like novel, filled with exclamatory remarks, directed to Jeffers, a character we never meet nor learn about their relationship to the narrator.

What strikes me about this novel is the performativity of it. It's about how people act, interact, and react. And M is very calculated in her portrayal of this. Above, I said her narration "appears to be candid," because I can't help but consider the amount of time that has passed from when L stayed at the second place to when she's recounting these memories and sharing them with Jeffers, and we don't ever know what her relationship to Jeffers is and thus we can't immediately assume she'd be nothing but open and honest with them and instead would deliberately and carefully portray herself in a certain light.

That being said, her character is not only unreliable but is unlikable. The book presupposes a certain level of paranoia from M in the sense that she displays a level of egotism, when really not everything revolves around her. From this, we also can infer that she's relatively insecure and defensive, which makes it hard to connect to her character or sympathize with her.

I loved the discussions of motherhood. Those aspects were the most compelling to me. But the rest was very hard to connect to. I know that I'm likely just not grasping the full weight of what Rachel Cusk has written here, but ultimately this was more of a painstakingly challenging read, and thus even though I think it exposes a lot about the human condition, it wasn't that enjoyable of a story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Faber for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Cusk demonstrated her usual incite into human relationships and I found reading Second Place very atmospheric (I felt I was another character stuck on the marsh). However, I did find some elements of the book stereotypical - the self absorbed artist, tense mother-daughter relationship etc, which is why I would not rate this five star.

Second Place is the story of a woman who invites a famous artist to her coastal house (the second place) and the dynamic of his presence around her family. She chose a life of comfort and security but the arrival of the artist is a turning point for her to explore her desires, her struggles, and her insecurities. I liked the calm atmosphere of the novel and the beautiful descriptions of nature, but this is ultimately hard to read. I would recommend it if you’ve read her other books, but not if you’re new to the author.

This book was not really for me. It is the first I read by Rachel Cusk and I have been told so many times to read her novels that I had high expectations - and I found this novel disappointing. It's mercifully very short, and it started well, but after a while I ended up feeling that maybe the book was not just challenging and I was not smart enough to read it - it was pretentious and trying too hard and there is nothing wrong with me as a reader. I loved many paragraphs, it has a certain wisdom to it ("I've often thought that there are certain characters who can't or won't learn the lesson of life, and that they live among us as either a nuisance or a gift"). But quite often I also suspect that if something seems to be deliberately obscure and vague, sometimes it isn't because it is particularly deep but because it tries to look deeper than it is. I enjoyed the unreliable (and unlikeable) narrator, I enjoyed her relationship with L, the painter who comes to stay in her guest house (the "second place") - both vampires of some sort - but was also relieved to reach the last page. And who uses so many exclamation points! There were too many! It was distracting!

Rachel Cusk is an absolute master. I loved her Outline trilogy, so to revisit her expert prose and her keen observations on humanity was a true pleasure. I feel so inspired by her writing and I always leave her books with Deep Thoughts and the utmost gratitude. Thank you for the copy!

Second place was full of snippets of observations and feelings I feel are also inside of me. Despite this relation to the main character I did not love it as much as expected. These snippets were poignant for me but the story as a whole was less so. Overall I can appreciate that it is a well written and intellectual book.

This was my first read of Cusk's work and I would read more, perhaps her essays.