Second Place: A Novel

By Rachel Cusk

Longlisted for the Booker Prize

On O, The Oprah Magazine’s list of 55 of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021

On a sun-soaked Parisian street, M, a mother on the brink of rebellion, wanders into a famous artist’s gallery show. The artist’s paintings speak—quite literally—to her, promising a liberation usually reserved for men. She returns to the coastal home she shares with her husband, but the unsettling impression of the art, and the evasive artist, remains. So she writes to him, inviting him to stay in their second place, a modest cottage salvaged from the land.

When historical catastrophe upends daily life, M’s daughter returns to the marsh, along with her prim, privileged boyfriend. The painter arrives too, accompanied by a lithe, cosmopolitan lover. As the couples become resigned to the perilous indoors, fissures form within the strange group. The painter’s quietly demonic presence wreaks havoc with M, plunging her into existential disarray. As secrets, alliances and private desires come to light, she is forced to choose between her deepest impulses: to comply or to rebel completely.

Like her acclaimed Outline trilogy, Rachel Cusk’s Second Place transcends its form. Inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir about the writer D. H. Lawrence’s fraught visit to her communal property, the novel hovers between past and present, Gothic and contemporary, fable and truth—and continues to haunt us long after we’ve looked away.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781443458740

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk read English at New College, Oxford. Her first novel Saving Agnes won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993. She reviews regularly for The Times and TLS.

Reviews for Second Place

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although I've enjoyed Cusk, this book did not work for me. It drifted, the characters were not fully drawn, the place, which may be the point, was the most memorable.

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“This is partly a story of will, and of the consequences of exerting it, you will notice… that everything I determined to happen happened, but not as I wanted it! This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it.

Narrator and protagonist M admires the artwork of famous artist L and invites him to stay in a guest cottage on her property. She lives in a marshy region near the coast. The book opens with M meeting “the Devil” on a train, and this encounter is the catalyst for her invitation to L. She envisions developing some type of (unspecified) relationship with him. At first, he spurns her invitation but eventually accepts. Much to M’s surprise, he arrives with a beautiful young woman. M lives in the main house with her second husband, Tony. Her adult daughter and her boyfriend are visiting.

The book is told in epistolary style, addressed to an individual named Jeffers (who plays no other role in the story). It is a character-driven book with little plot. The tone is dark. The writing is striking.

In addition to the literal “second place” (guest cottage), there are references to feeling inferior throughout the narrative. M is a writer but is overshadowed by L’s success as an artist. She feels second in beauty and attraction to the lovely Brett. She feels secondary to her ex-husband in their daughter’s affections. She feels that, as a woman in a creative field, she must overcome more hurdles than a man.

“I said to him that ‘second place’ pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn’t seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome.”

We spend the majority of time in M’s head. She is writing to Jeffers almost as if talking to herself. What she imagines will happen when L comes to stay is not what actually happens. L is a narcissist. He comes across as a rather despicable person.

“I realised, hearing him talk, that he was without any fibre of morality or duty, not out of any conscious decision but more in the way of lacking an elemental sense. He simply couldn’t conceive of the notion of obligation.”

M is not the most admirable character either. She does not appreciate her husband, Tony, though he seems like the most stable and empathetic character in the book. It is a book for those who do not mind unlikeable characters. I found it is easy to admire the writing and the craft.

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a fascinating work. I don’t quite have the words to describe it, but I feel like I am existing inside it, feeling the characters. The writing feels like there is all this space that allows you inside the story. While you aren’t exactly interacting with the characters, you’re up close and witnessing the story personally. Most of the time, it was like I was with my late wife and we were telling each other different things about what is happening in the book, just so neither of us would miss anything. I’m already planning to read the book again. It may be my state of mind, but this seems like a very unique experience.I finished this book under a lemon tree, and it was spectacular! It’s not even 200 pages of a small format book, but I think I took more notes than something two or three times as long. There are a few special books that I so want to know what Vicky would have thought of them, which is a frustratingly sad position to find myself in after decades of doing just that constantly. The plot is about relationships, the art world, place, family, and love. How do we fall in love? How does it age over the years? This was my favorite book in quite some time. I even got to read some of it while listening to Austin City Limits best of John Prine.[I will return and write more once I’ve pondered this book some more.]

[bobbieharv · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps if I had read Cusk's final note at the beginning, not the end, I would not have been so irritated at the intrusion of "Jeffers" every other page or so, but I doubt it. To me it was an unnecessary literary device that inserted itself, almost violently, between me and Cusk's masterful, gorgeous voice. The Outline trilogy was much less mannered, and thus to me much more enjoyable.But still 4 stars, for her writing.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When this book first came out several months ago I read a review where the reviewer compared Cusk's writing to Anita Brookner. Uhhh....no. Not even close. Brookner's long, luscious prose was nowhere to be found. At least from this reader's perspective and after all, I have become somewhat of an expert. But that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy this very introspective novel about a woman whose innermost thoughts consume most of the narrative.M and her second husband Tony, live in a house adjacent to a marsh where they built a "second place" that they use for guests who come and go. M writes a letter to L, an artist whose work she saw in Paris and fell in love with, and he decides to come and stay with his friend Brett. M's daughter Justine and her husband Kent are staying with M and Tony at this time. The interactions among these people provide the only action in the story as there's no plot really. The narrative is told through a letter that M writes to a friend, Jeffers and although there are six characters, it's really M's story about her relationship with L, who is one of the most obnoxious and misogynistic men I've ever encountered in literature. "While he spoke, a feeling had been growing inside me, of the most abject rejection and abandonment, because what I understood him to be saying underneath all his explanations was that my used-up female body was disgusting to him, and that this was the reason he kept me at a distance, even to the point of being unable to sit next to me."Ugh. And yet he somehow allows M to face her inner demons by forcing her to accept her role as a woman and a mother, mending her relationship with her daughter.At the end of the book, Cusk notes that the novel owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan's 1932 memoir of the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico. And of course I'm going to have to find that book and read it now.

[anniemod · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It was the name Jeffers that got me first. I knew I had seen it somewhere lately - the spelling was weird enough to make me wonder how can I see it twice in the same year. But I could not place it. I needed another name, Brett, to start wondering if this novel can somehow be connected to the artist colony in Taos. Had I looked at the author note at the end of the novel before I read the whole book, I would have seen Cusk's tribute. But let's get to the novel: M had settled finally on the border of a marsh with a new husband. But before that she met a painter, L, - met his paintings anyway at a time in her life when her life was a bit messed up. When she married Tony, she found the stability she needed - and they built a second house/cabin on their land - called the Second Place. It was supposed to go her daughter but when she moved away it became a refuge for anyone who needs a quiet time to be an artist (of one type or another). That's where our novel opens - with M sending a letter to L to invite him to come to the Second Place - and the story finally takes off when L actually arrives, with Brett in tow, and throws M's ordered life into a disarray. There is a plot somewhere in there, things do happen but the novel is more concerned with M's thoughts and feelings than with the real life. The whole novel is a set of letters/talks with Jeffers, written/happening after the whole story finished - so there is somewhat of an unreliable narration happening as well - M knows where the story is going so she shapes her story around that. The novel is an exploration of motherhood and womanhood - M's guilt (sometimes just in being a woman) and thoughts paint a picture which may sound too familiar sometimes. It is curious that the novel does not really have a set timeline - there is a disaster which happened (the Depression?) but it can be set in almost any time - even when Kurt decides to write, he picks up paper and pencil and explains it in the story - we never see a computer or a phone but that does not mean they could not have been there. And yet, with the Taos connection in my mind, that felt like the 20s/30s of the 20th century - even if the text does not get there. The invitation was meant to heal M but L is not what she really expected - so their relationship is anything but amicable for most of the book. That throws M into memories and flashbacks - when she is not unhappy.In 1932, Mabel Dodge Luhan published a memoir called "Lorenzo in Taos". It was based on D. H. Lawrence stay in the artist colony in Taos that she was running with her husband. The memoir is written by using the letters between Mabel, Lawrence and Robinson Jeffers (among others). and deals with the relationship between the author, his wife, Mabel and the artist Dorothy Brett. I read a book about the Southwest earlier this year and that's what triggered my memory - I had never read the memoir (but now I want to) but the Taos colony was important in the development of arts in New Mexico and the Southwest. Once that connection finally clicked, a lot of what I had issues with in the novel actually smoothed out - while the novel is not an exact replica of the real-life story, it has a lot of ties into it - some of them quite obvious, some of them a bit more hidden (for example the real life Tony won Mabel by sitting in his teepee every night and drumming, trying to get her to come to her; the novel's Tony wrote letters every day which were "as if he were beating a drum, steadily and without cease"). I am pretty sure that I missed a lot of these connections - especially early in the novel when I had not made the connection and even more because I do not know Mabel's story that well. I plan to read her memoir - I am really curious to see how close the novel is to the real life story.The novel is a tribute to the spirit of real-life Mabel - a woman that was bigger than life in a time when women were anything but. But I do wonder if that connection did not actually worked the opposite to what the author intended - without the Taos connection, the novel is flat and listless (and M is annoying) - it reads more like an essay on womanhood with somewhat wooden characters; with it, it kinda feels like a retelling which tries too hard to connect the dots without actually repeating the real life story. There are differences and the ending is different and yet... something just does not click cleanly together for me. I do not read a lot of contemporary novels and I probably would not have picked this one up if it was not for it landing on the Booker long list. Somewhere in the middle of the book I realized that I treat it more as a puzzle than as a novel - trying to find the Taos connections and to figure out the timeline. Which is never a good sign - I expect novels to keep me in the flow of their narrative. But it also seems to be in a style which is modern these days (even if it rarely works for me) so between the language (flowery and beautiful albeit overwritten in places) and the Taos connection, I can see why the literary circles may like it. I do wonder though if this would not have been a much better book if it was half its length, paired down to a novella. I guess we will never know.

[lisa7oldham · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Tried but could not get through. Self absorbed , unlikeable narrato.Nothing to make me care.have rarely disliked a book so strongly

[msf59 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A woman invites an acclaimed artist to stay in a cottage, on her property, which she fondly calls the “Second Place”. This mysterious and somewhat frightening man will begin to shed light on her life and her marriage, in unsettling ways. The writing here is beautiful without becoming heavy-handed and the author deftly keeps the narrative from sinking under it’s weighty subject matter. A great introduction to this Cusk's work.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Once at a dark point in her life, M stumbled upon a gallery exhibiting works by L. She was transfixed. L’s paintings were like a recognition of oneself, they knew her entirely. Years later when her circumstances had changed and she was living with her second husband, Tony, on a plot of land near the Norfolk marshes, she writes to L offering the use of their guest house, which she and Tony refer to as their “second place”, as a retreat, a studio, a refuge for as long as he might like to make use of it. At some point L takes M up on her offer. He arrives precipitously with an unannounced companion, a much younger woman named Brett, and takes up residence in M’s second place. L is not exactly as M imagined he would be. But what exactly was she expecting? It’s a question M asks herself as she writes about this period of her life to a correspondent named Jeffers.Rachel Cusk’s epistolary novel is meandering and introspective. M is filled with self-doubt but also anger and a kind of wistfulness. Her guard is nearly always up, yet she allows herself to be nearly destroyed by L’s rejection of her sympathies. They are seemingly at loggerheads. But it becomes increasingly clear that M’s desperate desire for L’s acknowledgement threatens to undermine her relationship with Tony and with her adult daughter, Justine, who happens to also be staying with them that summer. And then, perhaps not surprisingly, there is the question of art. For both L and M (she is described as having written “little” books), the wellspring of artistic creation may be personal pain. Is it ever anything more than that? And how does M’s narrative drive, or compulsion, fit in with her conception of artistic truth? And hey, you might be wondering, who the heck is Jeffers?Not all questions have answers here, not least the one about Jeffers, but M’s understandings and misapprehensions become rhythmically fascinating. She is remarkably opaque to herself, though perhaps not nearly so to her daughter and her husband. At some point you will get a niggle about just how much you want to trust her narrative account to Jeffers of these events and her reported thoughts and feelings. I liked it. More than I thought I would. And it will keep me thinking for some time.Recommended.

[ozzer_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Unlike Cusk’s “Trilogy” that eschewed most literary conventions, SECOND PLACE has an unusual devotion to them. It has a solid plot that appropriates much from a memoir written in 1932 by Mabel Dodge Luhan. “Lorenzo in Taos” recalls a time when Luhan lured a cantankerous D.H. Lawrence to her New Mexico ranch. He unexpectedly elevated the friction by bringing along his wife, Frieda; Luhan’s husband was a Native-American named Tony; and she tells her story to the poet Robinson Jeffers. These are just a few of its more prominent similarities to SECOND PLACE. Cusk’s literary structure is built on a dark gothic core. Unlike her more picaresque trilogy, where the protagonist moves around and does a lot of active listening, this novel employs a stream-of-conscious narration with abundant psychological musings. Apart from one prominent flashback, it has a linear narrative structure and a claustrophobic setting on a remote coastal marsh following an unspecified international disaster and subsequent lockdown. These conditions are “familiar to everyone,” she says, and these lead to the inevitable interpersonal frictions that color Cusk’s story.Notwithstanding these differences, Cusk’s themes remain familiar. Female identity is prominent. At one point, she refers to L as being “lucky to have been born a male.” She characterizes the meaning of art as a “serpent, whispering in our ears.” The illusory nature of love also comes into play— “so many of our feelings are illusions” and “false narratives arise from honest feelings.” Cusk explores property and boundaries with her central image of the second place. “A home,” L suggests, “is nothing more than a compartment in which we contain ourselves, and by which we keep others out.” Certainly, the intrusion of L’s friend Brett also is another prominent boundary breaching image in the book.M transforms from a young divorcee and mother to a recognized writer. Yet a persistent identity crisis seems to cast doubt on her success and reveals her as being on the verge of a breakdown. Worrisome thoughts emerge after she invites the painter, L, to work at her second place— “such strange, violent impulses were coming over me…I wanted to lie down and hammer my fists on the grass.” Her persistent control tactic of compartmentalization is beginning to fail. No doubt, L is a catalyst for those cracks in M’s wall beginning to appear— “strange, violent impulses were coming over me, one after another.”Cusk portrays L as a self-centered monster. He is obviously a talented but aloof painter who lacks any trace of common decency. He seems to be the personification of the Satan foreshadowed on the train during the novel’s opening flashback scene. L readily sees through M’s delusions and uses them as an excuse for refusing to paint her portrait. This is seen as humiliating by M because L has offered to paint portraits of her husband and daughter. Indeed, the novel reaches its climactic moment when M finally convinces L to reconsider, much to her husband Tony’s chagrin and disgust.The other characters in the novel seem to be satellites orbiting these two key figures. Nonetheless, they demonstrate important elements that illuminate the narrative. Tony, M’s second husband, is a moral icon of male privilege. Justine, her 21-year-old daughter is a tenuous touchstone of female connection who seems blithely oblivious to the obvious flaws M sees in her boyfriend, Kurt, and L’s friend Brett. Cusk is particularly brutal with her characterization of Brett— “her strange letterbox mouth hung blackly open” and she “lodged like a giant splinter in my life.” Despite being young and beautiful, Brett’s most annoying flaw seems to be an inherited life of privilege and a tendency to overly flaunt it.This is a satisfying reading experience filled with Cusk’s signature jaded musing about life and our times delivered with a narrative style that is crisp and often biting.

[hubblegal-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Mesmerizing, gorgeous writing. Most highly recommended. Now I must read "Lorenzo in Taos" by Mabel Dodge Luhan, her biography about her visitor, D.H. Lawrence. Ms. Cusk mentions the book at the end of hers.

[browner56 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

M is a middle-aged writer of modest talent. She is introspective and deeply thoughtful, but also terribly insecure about who she is and what her place is in the world. As she was recovering from an abusive marriage some years ago, she was strongly affected by viewing the paintings of L. Now remarried to her second husband, M decides to invite L to stay and work in the guest house that she and Tony have on their homestead in a remote coastal community. M is hopeful that a visit from L will boost her flagging self-esteem and provide her with the answers to the nagging questions about what is lacking in her life. After initially refusing the invitation, L suddenly appears one day, but with his glamorous and much younger girlfriend in tow. Their unexpected arrival requires M’s daughter and her boyfriend to vacate the guest house—or ‘second place’ as M calls it—which adds considerable tension to the situation. Clearly, this visit is not going to be the spiritual renewal that M was hoping for.So goes the basic story of Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s sparkling novel of male-female relationships, the role that art plays in nurturing our lives, the fraught way in which mothers and daughters interact, the cruelties that we sometimes inflict on one another, and a whole lot more. Written as a long letter to a poet friend, the book reads as a lengthy therapy session in which M. works out her frustrations and disappointments with pretty much every aspect of her existence, but most of all her disillusionment with the man L actually is and how little solace he ultimately provides. Although the story itself is well plotted, the work really shines as a character study of at least two complex and very flawed people. And then, of course, there is Cusk’s prose, which is always closely observed and occasionally quite remarkable, starting with the delicious double entendre of the title: the guest house itself becomes an imposing presence in the tale and M clearly feels herself to be in second place as both an artist and a woman.While Second Place struck me as being wholly original, it actually has an interesting heritage. As the author explains in a brief Afterword, the story was inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of a tense visit that writer D. H. Lawrence and his wife made to her New Mexico estate in 1932 (which explains the M and the L as character names, by the way). Regardless of that connection, this was an emotionally evocative and highly satisfying book to read. It is not a long story in terms of page count, but the philosophical complexity that Cusk creates with her language demands a great deal of attention from the reader; I found myself highlighting many passages throughout the book containing some sentences that were simply stunning. All the more remarkable is how much I enjoyed this novel without actually liking any of the characters (except perhaps for Tony)! That must certainly be one way to define great writing.

[lethalmauve · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?"Rachel Cusk's novel, Second Place, is inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan's memoir, Lorenzo in Taos. It's about D.H. Lawrence's fraught visit in Taos upon Luhan's invitation. But the artistic license Cusk takes here is not to be understated. She carefully and sensitively crafts a unique style and structure where the inner lives of her characters glow and pale through the contemplative storytelling of her female protagonist, M. The entirety of the novel is addressed to one Jeffers. And it almost feels as if Jeffers is the reader. It tells a painter's, L, stay in an isolated coastal region where M lives. And while it is a novel that laboriously swims the marsh of relationships, in motherhood and marriage, at the helm it is a profound examination of how art can repel and magnetise an artist with their audience in close encounters. Idealisation of an artist when their art imparts a distinct resonation is not unusual. But there is frequently a danger in these idealisations. More so, once these ideals are shattered and replaced by the ugly truth. More so, when there is subtle crossover from being a mere audience to a (ridiculed) muse. A toxic power dynamic between them bind them to each other.What makes Second Place emotionally captivating is its glimpses of existential epiphanies and self-realisations girded by M's being female. M's struggles and insecurities in her womanliness pervade her actions and decisions which dislodges her already uncertain place in the world as a woman. It is worth noting as well that M is a writer and L acknowledges this with a tone of mockery while equally dissatisfied with his own works. The enduring dependence of women with men is also alluded to with M's inspection of her own reliance and bond with them. Most importantly, there is also nod to the privilege men has in a society dominated and controlled by them. The amount of opportunities and recognitions men receive compared to women in the art realm alone is much too obvious to ignore. Cusk's paints a compelling language of realism within these pages with such affecting grace. It nudges you and make you look inward, see the hues of life forever altered by art, and clasp your own place in this world however vague and senseless it may be. Second Place is my first novel of Cusk. It is a memorable introduction. And I'll be sure to grab one or two of her other works the next time I visit the bookshop.Thanks, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the advance copy.