Rachel Cusk, ‘Second Place’ (2021)

[Note: this is the tenth of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. For links to reviews and thoughts on the others, see the headnote to this post.]

In Big Tom Hanks, a kid magically inserted into the body of a grown up, works for a toy company. His ideas are big hits (since he has the echt kid insight into what kids enjoy) and he is rapidly promoted. In an attempt to catch-up with him his adult colleagues propose a Transformers-like toy: robots that fold-over and transform into buildings. Playing with a protoype during a company meeting, Hanks’s character says: ‘I don’t get it. So it turns into a … building? I don’t get it.’ I think about that scene from time to time. 

Rachel Cusk’s new novel, or novella, is called Second Place, a play-on-words that refers both in a property sense to second homes, and also to not coming first, not winning the race, trailing behind life’s winners.

The ‘story’ can be quickly summarised. The narrator, ‘M’, is writing to an individual identified only as ‘Jeffers’ (who makes no other appearance in the story except as the addressee to these thoughts). She tells Jeffers that she met the devil on a train journey. Then she talks about seeing an exciting artist, ‘L’, on a trip to Paris. M and her husband Tony live in a big house in the country—East Anglia, I suppose, though it’s not specified—to which is appended, on an adjacent piece of land, the ‘second place’ of the book’s title: a cottage into which M and her husband like to invite artists, to allow them to get away from the city and other constraints and concentrate on ‘the higher things’, making great art. 

So M invites L to stay, which he does, bringing with him his much younger girlfriend, Brett. The presence of Brett upsets and disturbs our narrator, partly because Brett is young and beautiful where M no longer is, and partly because Brett connects with M’s 21-year-old daughter, Justine, who (as is the way with daughters) is more or less disconnected from her mother. But also because Brett, and L, are beastly towards M.

Why is ‘Jeffers’ the addressee, here? As I read I wondered if Cusk meant her readers to think of Susan Jeffers, author of the (once-famous) self-help book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (1987). But the novel ends with a brief postscript that acknowledges the inspiration of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos (1935), an epistolary account of the time D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent in New Mexico in the 1920s, at Luhan's invitation. I haven’t read Lorenzo in Taos, but it seems letters therein are addressed to poet Robinson Jeffers. So there you go. Though he's a painter rather than a novelist/poet, Cusk's ‘L’ is in some sense Lawrence. Just as Lawrence’s stay was chaotic and disruptive for Mabel (at one point he threatened to ‘destroy her’, it seems; which is what L tells M in Cusk’s narrative) so it happens here.

In other words we might read this as a book about art and the relationship of art to life. Perhaps a book about how ‘true’ art is (somehow) disruptive and traumatic and so on. But the obliqueness here misfits this theme, or so I thought. The sense in which Cusk has assiduously worked her Rotary Floor Polisher over the hardwood tiles of her style, until the whole empty room of her novel is buffed and gleaming, jars with those moments when she is striving for something rougher, more vital and raw and volcanic.

One distinctiveness of Cusk is her unembarrassment at penning wisdom-nugget, gnomic, “ah! how true…” sentences. She tells us things about the way the universe is, and especially the way human beings and their relationships are. I'll be honest: I find something cramping in the way her writing gives its readers such little space to disagree:

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal—or can be.

Um ... I'm going to go with: no?

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

This isn’t right, I think. I suppose fear might become a habit (although, surely, often fear is not habitual), but so far from killing what is essential in ourselves, habit is a needful and largely salutary aspect of our human being in the world. Imagine living a life entirely liberated from habit! Re-inventing yourself afresh second by second—you’d have a nervous breakdown. I mean, perhaps that’s Cusk’s point, but I doubt it. You can see, though, why I wondered if the whole novel was addressed to Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

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.

Since our narrator is free from many of the things that enchain the rest of us—poverty, the grind of work, the mind-forged manacles of doctrinal ideology, religion and so on—this may be irony. I'm not sure though. M goes on, referring to her husband:

I believe Tony is free, and his freedom doesn’t look like much. He gets on his blue tractor to mow the tall grass that has to be cut back for spring and I watch him calmly going up and down in his big floppy hat under the sky, back and forth in the noise of the engine. All around him the cherry trees are welling up, the little nubs on their branches straining to burst into blossom for him, and the skylark shoots into the sky as he passes and hangs there singing and twirling like an acrobat. Meanwhile I just sit staring straight in front of me with nothing to do.

Diddums! If why do we live so painfully in our fictions? is asking: ‘why are we so drawn to tragedy?’ then the standard answers to this critical chestnut—catharsis, dignity, Hegelian dialectical synthesis of life and death into something positive—have no place in this short novel. There’s something else, aspiring perhaps to Kafka’s ‘axe to break up the frozen sea within us’, although if so the refinement of these characters, not just their level of wealth and privilege but their supersensitivity, limits the the novel's follow-through.

It all suddenly became too much for me, and one day when I was lacing my shoe I fainted and remember nothing of what happened for the next twenty four hours—it seemed I was on holiday, lying on the bed with a smile on my face, while Tony and Justine took turns sitting anxiously beside me.

It's like the old kids' rhyme: one, two/buckle my shoe/three, four/pass out with the sheer crushing-ness of existence and fall on the floor. Nice to be the centre of attention! Nice to be noticed, and cossetted, and so on. And if you find you aren’t being treated like that, then perhaps a strategic illness is needful to refocus other people’s priorities. Of course, you can’t be ill all the time:

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 give 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!

Tony is a solid, dependable sort; so it may be that his heedfulness lacks the spicier je ne sais quoi M actually craves. At all times hold in mind the Bart Simpson mantra: attention garnered for bad reasons is better than no attention at all. What does M get from inviting L to stay with her? Could it be that some part of her actually wants this kind of thing?

I heard L. say:

‘Let’s give her a moustache, the castrating bitch!’ while Brett shrieked with laughter … blotting the figure’s upper lip with thick black strokes.

‘And let’s give her a nice fat little belly,’ Brett cried, ‘a barren belly like a middle-aged lady’s! She’s skinny all over, but her belly gives her away, the bitch.’

‘A big hairy moustache,’ L said, ‘so we know who’s in charge. We know who’s in charge, don’t we? Don’t we?’

This clonking orgy of rudeness reads clumsily, the more so because so much of the rest of the novel is so carefully focussed, tonally and stylistically. It doesn’t help that Cusk feels the need to ram the point home:

And the two of them howled, while I stood in my wedding dress beyond the window in the glade where night was falling and trembled, trembled to the soles of my feet. It was me they were talking about, me they were painting—I was Eve! A terrible darkness flooded my mind.

We might chalk this up to an attempt to move Cusk’s usual idiom into something Lawrentian, something more hyper-active and passionate and furious. In Women in Love (1920) the various women and men all stew in the blood-pumping intensity of their various relationships. At one point, for no particular reason, Hermione picks up a glass paperweight and hits Birkin on the head with it. This is Birkin’s reaction:

Birkin, perfectly direct in his motion, went out of the house and straight across the park, to the open country, to the hills. The brilliant day had become overcast, spots of rain were falling. He wandered on to a wild valley-side, where were thickets of hazel, many flowers, tufts of heather, and little clumps of young fir-trees, budding with soft paws. …

Yet he wanted something. He was happy in the wet hillside, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses, moving his feet softly among the primroses, his legs, his knees, his arms right up to the arm-pits, lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.

But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir-trees, that were no higher than a man. The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly.

Chacun a son gout, we might say (chacun a son ooh! argh! ouch!); but it takes Lawrence’s slightly unhinged extremism of approach, his existential Year Zero fundamentalism, to make this work (‘Birkin thought about Hermione and the blow. He could feel a pain on the side of his head. But after all, what did it matter? What did Hermione matter, what did people matter altogether? There was this perfect cool loneliness, so lovely and fresh and unexplored. Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman’). Cusk can’t manage the all-in, scorched earth quality of Lawrence, and we’re left with a kind of cliché adolescent moodiness, the shallow cycling of trivial ups-and-downs. Conceivably this is Cusk’s point, although if it is I'm not sure I take the force of it.

I couldn’t keep still any longer and I ran through the house and through the kitchen, where Justine and Kurt were standing quietly at the counter, shelling the mountain of peas that had just come in from the garden.

‘Isn’t it beautiful outside?’ I said. ‘I feel so alive today!’

They both lifted their faces and stared dumbly at me, and I left my bag on leaves on the counter and ran on, up the stairs and into my room, and I closed the door behind me and dropped down on the bed. Why didn’t anyone want me to be happy? Why were they all so disapproving, the minute I showed any excitement and high spirits? … Oh why was living so painful, and why were we given these moments of health, if only to realise how burdened with pain we were the rest of the time?

From reading other reviews of Second Place I discover that these more heightened, cartoony moments are adapted from mis-en-mélodrame passages in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s original book. But I’m not going to read that work, and have little sympathy with a work of modern fiction that requires the crutch of such an obscure text to hobble its way along.

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.

Sure. Bollocks to ‘reality’. Except … what if ‘the unreal’ turns out to be not an aesthetic transcendence, and rather a subconscious still marinaded in adolescent insecurity and histrionism? What if, instead of D H Lawrence, you end up sounding like Pitt The Younger in that Blackadder episode, where he reads his teenage poetry to the unimpressed royal butler? (‘Why doesn’t anyone want me to be happy? Why are they all so disapproving?’) ... Tom Hanks isn’t actually a kid inside an adult body, you know. He’s just pretending to be one for that movie. A movie actually made by a kid would be a mess. And ‘I don’t get it’ might mean: I have, due to my own inadequacies, missed the deeper sophistication and point of this. I am only too aware of my manifold inadequacies, believe me. But ‘I don’t get it’ might mean: this robot turns into a building? What?