An exploration of themes of art, motherhood, family and responsibilities, Cusk offers a cold and unfeeling view of a life lived at the edge of things. M, the unnamed narrator, invites L, an artist to stay and then suffers the consequences to herself and her family. Finely written and thought-provoking, this book leaves you with more questions than answers.

Thanks to Faber for letting me read Second Place! I really enjoyed the first two books in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy (I need to read the third!) so I was fairly confident this would be another treat, but sadly it just wasn't for me. A woman invites a famous painter to stay in a second property on her marshy land, and the entire novel is addressed to 'Jeffords' and forms a meditation on humanity, art and the complexity of existing. I didn't understand a lot of it - weird when I so instinctively and easily latched onto similar musings in Outline - but, even more crucially, I didn't really care about the characters or what was happening. This just wasn't my kind of thing, but other Rachel Cusk fans seem to love it so I would definitely recommend checking it out if you're interested.

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.

Stream of consciousness books are often not easy to read, but after a rather slow start whilst the narrator introduced herself and set the scene, this just became more and more engrossing. It is peopled by extraordinarily diverse characters - the fragile narrator herself, her gentle giant of a husband, whose waters run very deep, her daughter who really comes of age as the book goes on, and ‘L’ the brilliant but narcissistic and brutal artist who begins as the narrator’s hero and becomes her nemesis as the story progresses. Only two other characters complete the cast, along with the landscape where the story is set, which is a character in itself. The book explores themes of love, loss, redemption, obsession, sense of place, duty and in its stunningly beautiful writing leaves the reader waking up from an almost dreamlike state at the end. Really extraordinary writing and well worth persevering with in spite of the slow start.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk concerns the group dynamics between a woman and her second husband, her daughter and partner, and the artist and his friend who also come to stay.

Thoroughly enjoyable. Rachel Cusk writes in such a particular way that it takes a while settle back into her slightly unnerving prose but once you are in, you get taken away to her world.

Rachel Cusk is a modern-day Chekhov. I say that without a hint of hyperbole. Find me someone who is better at writing about halcyon holidays where characters move in-and-out of each other’s lives as effortlessly as sand through fingers. Cusk has the phenomenal ability to write simple prose yet punch you in the guts with a sentence so profound, it will make your head spin. Characters are defined in relation to one another and also by what they are not. I truly felt like I was inside M’s head and fascinated by everything she saw.

Thanks to NetGalley, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux and Rachel Cusk and for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I find it takes a long time for the full meaning of any book by Rachel Cusk to sink in. But if the mark of a good read is it staying with you then this fits the bill. Cusk's female characters spend time and look deeply into their thoughts and motivations, this time evil being one of the main themes of contemplation. Initially I did not like the main character at all but her growing acceptance of her daughter and her increasing appreciation of Tony drew me in. I will be thinking about this one for awhile.

Second Place is a novel about a woman who invites an artist to stay in the 'second place', the little house in the garden of her own, and what happens to art and relationships as balances change. The narrator, M, is telling writing to tell Jeffers, someone she knows, about this period in her life, in which she invited famed artist L. to stay with her and her husband Tony. Hoping to be drawn into L's life and art, instead she finds herself with a tempestuous man who seems to resent her presence, who came with an unexpected friend, and might threaten the balance of the lives of her and her family.

The narrative voice is particularly distinctive in this novel, both in terms of the sometimes unreliable, sometimes unlikeable way she frames events and in terms of the way it frames the novel as an episode she's reflecting on. The writing felt clever and carefully crafted, though I didn't always appreciate this fact whilst actually reading, and I was surprised at how readable the prose was considering that it was dealing with a lot of philosophical considerations and the narrator was given to acting like you must understand what she's saying or that a truism holds.

In fact, the main thing I didn't like about the book was that at times the narrator's proclamations and sense of herself as the most important person in every story wore on me, even though they're part of her character. I did like the careful balance of so few characters, and the very contained nature of the story, in which the narrator alludes a lot to the past but never gives you all the details.

This was the first of Cusk's books I've read (I kept seeing the Outline trilogy around but mostly Kudos so I just thought 'oh I've not read the previous ones' and moved on). The writing was memorable and the narrative structure was good, but I didn't quite feel engaged with the deeper side of it.

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!