#Popkey not working full

One obstacle to summarising Cusk’s writing is her aversion to plot, as opposed to argument, as a vector for conveying meaning. When L does at last ask her to sit for him, M’s frenzied, desirous reaction is nearly the end of her marriage to Tony.

#Popkey not working full

M, who has never considered herself particularly attractive and is now middle-aged, with greying hair and a wardrobe full of shapeless clothes, comes to suspect that her ‘used-up female body’ is ‘disgusting’ to L. This surprise is a sign of disappointments to come, and the visit proceeds unhappily for M, whom L for the most part avoids. M’s invitation is, after some delay, accepted and L arrives, bringing with him, unexpectedly, a young female companion, Brett. Luhan’s memoir takes the form of letters to, among others, the poet Robinson Jeffers. L’s paintings, as described, sound like Lucian Freud’s, though Cusk notes, at the back of the book, that he is intended as a D H Lawrence figure, and that Second Place itself ‘owes a debt’ to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of the period of time, near the end of Lawrence’s life, when he and his wife stayed with her in Taos, New Mexico. ‘I saw,’ M tells Jeffers, ‘in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state, which had never truly been revealed to me before.’ M was then at the beginning of the end of her first marriage, the decline of which was hastened by the transformative experience she had before L’s paintings. M hopes L will paint the marsh she has been an admirer of his work since, years before, she happened upon an exhibition of his at a gallery in Paris. M invites a famous painter, L, to stay in the guest house (the ‘second place’ of the title) that she and her second husband, Tony, have constructed on the remote marsh where they live.

M is by far a more active narrator than the Outline trilogy’s Faye, not only relating events but also playing a significant role in initiating them. That said, Second Place is, certainly by Cusk’s recent standards, eventful. The effect is increasingly comic (‘You know what I look like, Jeffers’ ‘I’m telling you all this, Jeffers’ ‘It almost goes without saying, Jeffers’), Cusk dutifully but with no little cheek reminding the reader that her narrator should be imagined either speaking at torturous length or writing someone a two-hundred-page letter. In Second Place, the narrator – in the letters that form part of the text, she is referred to as M – speaks, or more likely writes, to an interlocutor named Jeffers. Second Place, like the novels of Cusk’s recent Outline trilogy, achieves psychological acuity precisely by excising many of the conventions of what the critic James Wood has called ‘commercial realism’, elements of which – metaphor and simile the ‘telling detail’ – occasionally do crop up, but within or immediately beside monologues of such length, cogence and erudition that they do not so much argue for the reality of Cusk’s representations as offer a string of realist signifiers that prompt readers to suspend their disbelief.

In recent years, Rachel Cusk’s approach to this tangle has been akin to Alexander’s advance on the knot in Gordium: she moves with confidence and a sharp tool.

There’s a tension in fiction that aspires to any degree of psychological realism: on the one hand, the author must craft characters who seem to operate with the sense of freedom of people in the real world on the other, a character’s every move is dictated by the author – no action they take is freely chosen.