Second Place: A Novel

By Rachel Cusk

A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy.

A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma—and disrupts the calm of her secluded household.

Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift—and to destroy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374720797

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.

Book preview

I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life. It was like a contamination, Jeffers: it got into everything and turned it bad. I don’t think I realised how many parts of life there were, until each one of them began to release its capacity for badness. I know you’ve always known about such things, and have written about them, even when others didn’t want to hear and found it tiresome to dwell on what was wicked and wrong. Nonetheless you carried on, building a shelter for people to use when things went wrong for them too. And go wrong they always do!

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves. I was left with a kind of blankness, Jeffers, from those years of being afraid. I kept on expecting things to jump out at me – I kept expecting to hear the same laughter of that devil I heard the day he pursued me up and down the train. It was the middle of the afternoon and very hot, and the carriages were crowded enough that I thought I could get away from him merely by going and sitting somewhere else. But every time I moved my seat, a few minutes later there he’d be, sprawled across from me and laughing. What did he want with me, Jeffers? He was horrible in appearance, yellow and bloated with bloodshot bile-coloured eyes, and when he laughed he showed dirty teeth with one entirely black tooth right in the middle. He wore earrings and dandyish clothes that were soiled with the sweat that came pouring out of him. The more he sweated, the more he laughed! And he gabbled non-stop, in a language I couldn’t recognise – but it was loud, and full of what sounded like curses. You couldn’t exactly ignore it, and yet that was precisely what all the people in the carriages did. He had a girl with him, Jeffers, a shocking little creature, nothing more than a painted child who was barely clothed – she sat on his knee with parted lips and the soft gaze of a dumb animal while he fondled her, and nobody said or did a thing to stop him. Of all the people on that train, was it true that the one most likely to try was me? Perhaps he followed me up and down the carriages to tempt me into it. But it was not my own country: I was only passing through, going back to a home I thought of with secret dread, and it didn’t seem up to me to stop him. 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. If I’d stood up to him, perhaps all the things that happened afterwards wouldn’t have occurred. But for once I thought, let someone else do it! And that is how we lose control over our own destinies.

My husband Tony sometimes says to me that I underestimate my own power, and I wonder whether that makes living more hazardous for me than for other people, the way it’s dangerous for those who lack the ability to feel pain. 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. What they cause can be called trouble or it can be called change – but the point is, though they may not mean to or want to, they make it happen. They’re always stirring things up and objecting and upsetting the status quo; they won’t just leave things be. They themselves are neither bad nor good – that’s the important thing about them – but they know good from bad when they see it. Is this how the bad and the good continue to flourish alongside each other in our world, Jeffers, because certain people won’t let either one get the upper hand? That day on the train, I decided to pretend not to be one of them. Life looked so much easier all of a sudden, over there behind the books and newspapers people were holding up in front of their faces to hide the devil from their sight!

What is certain is that afterwards many changes occurred, and I had to use all my strength and my belief in right and my capacity for pain to survive them, so that I nearly died from it – and after that, I was no longer a nuisance to anyone. Even my mother decided she liked me for a while. Eventually I found Tony and he helped me recover, and when he gave me the life of peace and gentleness here on the marsh, what did I do but find fault with the beauty and the peace and try to stir them up! You know about that story, Jeffers, because I’ve written it down elsewhere – I mention it only to help you see how it connects to what I want to tell you about now. It seemed to me that all this beauty was no good if it had no immunity: if I could harm it, then anyone could. Whatever power it is that I have, it’s nothing compared to the power of stupidity. That was and remains my reasoning, even though I could have taken the opportunity to live an idyll here of easeful impotence. Homer says it in The Iliad, when he mentions the pleasant homes and occupations of the men cut down in battle, not forgetting their fancy battledress and their hand-tooled chariots and armour. All that sweet cultivating and building, all that possession, to be chopped apart with a sword, stamped out in the seconds it takes to stamp on an ant.

I’d like to go with you, Jeffers, back to the morning in Paris before I boarded the train that held the bloated, yellow-eyed devil: I’d like to make you see it. You are a moralist, and it will take a moralist to understand how it was that one of the fires that started that day was allowed to keep on smouldering over the years, how its core stayed alive unnoticed and secretly fed itself, until the time when my circumstances were finally replenished and it caught alight on the new things and blazed again into life. That fire was laid in Paris, in the early morning, where a seducing dawn lay over the pale forms of the Île de la Cité and the air was held in the absolute stillness that presages a beautiful day. The sky got bluer and more blue and the green fresh banks of foliage were motionless in the warmth, and the blocks of light and shadow that bisected the streets were like the eternal primordial shapes that lie on the faces of mountain ranges and seem to come from inside them. The city was quiet and mostly empty of humans, so that it felt as though it were itself more than human and could only reveal it when there was no one to see. I had lain awake all the short hot summer night in my hotel bed and so when I saw dawn between the curtains I had got up and gone down to walk beside the river. It seems presumptuous, Jeffers, not to mention meaningless, to describe my experience in this way, as if it had the slightest bit of significance. Doubtless someone else is walking beside that same stretch of river at this minute, likewise committing the sin of believing that things happen for a reason, and that that reason is herself! But I need to give you my state of mind on that morning, the exalted sense of possibility I felt, to make you understand what came out of it.

I had spent the evening in the company of a famous writer, who was actually nothing more significant than a very lucky man. I met him at an art gallery opening, from which he took sufficient pains to extricate me that my vanity was gratified. I didn’t get sexual attention very often in those years, though I was young, and I suppose good-looking enough. The trouble was, I had the dumb loyalty of a dog. This writer was of course an insufferable egotist, as well as a liar, and not even a very believable one; and I, alone in Paris for the night, with my disapproving husband and child waiting back at home, was so thirsty for love I would drink, it seemed, from any source. Truly, Jeffers, I was a dog – there was such a heavy weight inside me, I could only writhe senselessly like an animal in pain. It pinned me down in the depths, where I thrashed and struggled to get free and swim to the brilliant surface of life – at least, that’s how it looked from below. In the company of the egotist, tramping from bar to bar in the Paris night, I intimated for the first time the possibility of destruction, the destruction of what I had built; not, I assure you, for his sake, but for the possibility he embodied – which had never once occurred to me until that night – of violent change. The egotist, permanently drunk on his own importance, sliding breath mints between his dry lips when he thought I wouldn’t notice and talking about himself non-stop: he didn’t actually fool me, though I admit I wanted him to. He gave me plenty of rope to hang him with, but of course I didn’t hang him – I played along, half believing it myself, which was more of the luck he’d evidently had all his life. We said goodbye at two in the morning at the entrance to the hotel, where he visibly – to the point of unchivalrousness – decided I wasn’t worth whatever risk to his status quo our spending the night together would have represented. And I went to bed and hugged the memory of his attention until the roof seemed to lift off the hotel and the walls to fall away and the huge starry darkness to embrace me with the implications of what I felt.

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. 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. That’s all I’ve managed as far as freedom is concerned, to get rid of the people and the things I don’t like. After that, there isn’t all that much left! When Tony’s been working on the land I rouse myself to cook for him, and go out to pick herbs from the garden and to look in the shed for potatoes. At that time of year – the spring – the potatoes we store in the shed start to sprout, even though we keep them in complete darkness. They throw out these white fleshy arms because they know it’s spring, and sometimes I’ll look at one and realise a potato knows more than most people do.

The morning after that night in Paris, when I got up and walked beside the river, my body barely felt the ground: the green glittering water, and the worn slanted stone walls of palest beige, and the early sun shining on them and on me as I moved through them, made such a buoyant element that I became weightless. I wonder whether that is what it feels like to be loved – by which I mean the important love, the one you receive before you know strictly speaking that you exist. My safety in that moment felt limitless. What was it, I wonder, that I saw to make me feel that way, when in reality I was anything but safe? When in fact I had glimpsed the germ of a possibility that was soon to grow and rage like a cancer through my life, consuming years, consuming substance; when a few hours later I would be sitting face-to-face with the devil himself?

I must have wandered along for quite some time, because when I came back up to the street the shops were open and there were people and cars moving around in the sun. I was hungry, and so I started to pay attention to the shopfronts, looking for somewhere I could buy something to eat. I’m not good in that situation, Jeffers: I find it difficult to answer my own needs. The sight of other people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without. I hold back, embarrassed by need – my own and other people’s. This sounds like a ridiculous quality, and I’ve always known I would be the first to be trampled underfoot in a crisis, though I’ve noticed that children are also like this and find the needs of their particular body embarrassing. When I say this to Tony, that I would be the first to go under because I wouldn’t fight for my share, he laughs and says he doesn’t think so. So much for self-knowledge, Jeffers!

Whatever the truth is, there weren’t many people about that morning in Paris, and the streets where I was walking, which were somewhere near the Rue du Bac, were entirely devoid of things to eat in the first place. Instead the shops were full of exotic fabrics and antiques and colonial-era curios costing several weeks of an ordinary person’s wages, and of a particular fragrance which was the fragrance, I suppose, of money, and I looked in the windows as I passed, as though I were considering making a purchase of a large carved-wood African head at that early hour of the morning. The streets were perfect chasms of light and shade and I made sure to stay in the sun, walking without any other purpose or direction. Presently, ahead of me, I saw a sign that had been set out on the pavement, and on that sign was an image. The image, Jeffers, was of a painting by L, and it was part of an advertisement for an exhibition of his work at a gallery nearby. Even from a distance I recognised something about it, though I still can’t say quite what it was, because though I had vaguely heard of L, I had no real idea when or how I had heard of him, nor of who he was or what he painted. Nonetheless he spoke to me: he addressed me there on that Paris street, and I followed the signs one after another

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.

[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.