Compassion Is The True Test Of A Person In 'Second Place'
Rachel Cusk follows her acclaimed Outline trilogy with this story about a woman whose lifelong obsession with a truculent painter is tested when he comes to stay at a cottage on her property.
Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, which so brilliantly pushed against the confines of fiction to explore the power of narrative, left us wondering what she would write next. Would she go back to her earlier, more conventional satires of the stresses of family life? Or would she continue to probe questions about the connection between freedom and gender and art and suffering in serial conversations with strangers?
The trilogy is ahard act to follow, but is an excellent next step. A writer we know only as M delivers a
