This beautifully written book is about our time, integrated with thoughts on more general topics of identity, reality, power, love, and creation, among others. The main character, M, invites a famous artist to stay at a house near her home in a scenic location, hoping this would be a source of inspiration for the artist, but also that the interaction would liven up M's own social life. From day one the stay turns out awkward, resulting in unexpected events and outcomes. This activates a process of reassessing M's ideas about herself, her creative work, relationships, and her living place. All the nuances of friction are described with a subtle and exquisite language - very enjoyable!

3.5, rounded down. Cusk is an extremely talented writer, with impeccably precise command of her own unmistakable style, and an unflinchingly honest and critical perspective on life, art, and gender. But this wasn't quite on the same level as her [book:Outline trilogy|40942732], which had a sense of flow and ease that Second Place lacks. This is also a much more challenging read, and I think I might enjoy it more on a re-read.

Instead of a narrator who's passively listening to other people's self-absorbed narratives, Second Place is unreliably narrated by M, a middle-aged occasional writer whose thought processes are convoluted and aberrant. M is obsessed with L, a famous male painter, whom she invites to stay in her guesthouse (the second place) in what is probably the coast of East Anglia, during a global economic crisis that might be Covid. But the outside world barely intrudes upon M's consciousness and the emotional lives of the other characters, who are more archetypes than psychologically believable human beings.

The awkwardly-paced action follows the increasing disruptions that L and his girlfriend/muse impose upon M's family, which includes her saintly/earthly farmer husband, her millennial daughter from her first marriage, and the daughter's pretentious/ambitious Berliner boyfriend. But this isn't much of a chamber opera, because M has so little insight into the emotions and motivations of the others, and is blinded by obsession and self-absorption that becomes suffocating.

Along the way, M articulates some unforgettable mini-essays about motherhood and sexuality, and deftly probes the tangled relationship between art and life, unreality and reality. But even a short stay in this cramped guest cottage didn't give me room to breathe.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

In this short novel, addressed to a character named Jeffers, a first-person narrator only known as M invites an artist named L. to the coastal home and artists retreat that she owns with her second husband. This happens against the background of what might be a pandemic or an economic collapse that leaves people unable to travel, unless they have some form of private transport. Her own daughter and the daughter's boyfriend have both returned to stay because they've lost their jobs in the unspecified crisis. The artist, whose work had inspired her to leave her first marriage years earlier, turns up with his much younger girlfriend/companion. M's spiritual and romantic expectations of his visit are upended, as everyone pairs up in different and unexpected ways, and her need for drama is visited on her second, largely unexamined marriage...

Second Place, appropriately, is somewhere between Rachel Cusk's novelly novels and formally experimental Outline trilogy. Like all Cusk, it's compulsively readable while offering sharp, incisive, revelations of character that seem to have been forged from some horrendous personal fires. There is a definite structure, but it's used largely to hang the author's ideas about freedom, femininity, motherhood, making art, and personality. The characters have an air of unreality (which is sometimes intentionally funny - Brett, L's companion, happens to have a ridiculous number of chronologically unfeasible accomplishments, while Kurt, M's daughter's boyfriend, seems to have been created to have a sly dig at a certain kind of writer). I'd say that this was similar to Transit in some ways - with the hysteria of the end-sequence of the children's party- but the coastal isolation and the unspecified global event add a sense of timelessness to the story.

Unreality - another theme - is a dangerous word to mention in relation to Cusk's work because I'm sure it has a distinct meaning that I didn't get. My reading of it - as I read - was that L. represented a kind of (distinctly male) artistic freedom from the self that is near-impossible especially if you're not an artist (of any gender), but also implicated in many other relationships. M. is brittle and full of pain, conscious of her failings and dependencies, and more so as her life with her husband is so stable. She thinks that L. embodies that freedom, but actually it's his work and the ability to create that effect that enraptures her. She invites him essentially because she wants to see the landscape through his eyes. When she sees his paintings, as a young mother in a difficult marriage, she thinks: '...there's something that paintings and other created objects can do to give you relief. They give you a location, a place to be, when the rest of the time the space has been taken up because the criticism got there first...' In contrast, L.'s work finds the words for her feelings: 'The paintings found them, somewhere inside me. I don't know who they belonged to, or even who spoke them - just that they were spoken'. This is a very simple reading - I have no doubt that I will go back and re-read this book at least once more.

It is endlessly quotable, some examples (with the proviso this is a galley and they may change):

'Life rarely offers sufficient time or opportunity to be free in more than one way'

'I wonder what it feels like, to adopt a child and then prefer it to one's own. It seems, somehow, completely understandable'.

'The wounded don't survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival, and how can she be just subject to revelation after that?'

On parenting - 'I have often considered the survival of paintings, and what it is means for our civilisation that an image has survived across time undamaged, and something of the morality of that survival - the survival of the original - pertains, I believe, to the custody of human souls too'.

Although it's not necessary, it might also be fun/enlightening to read Lorenzo in Taos, by Mabel Dodge Luhan - Cusk notes in the afterword that she owes a debt to the book, an account of D.H. Lawrence coming to stay with the writer.

3.5 rounded down

Cusk's latest literary offering Second Place felt more of a challenging read than her other fiction (specifically the Outline Trilogy), although this is not to say it is a book without many merits, and I expect it is one I would get more out of on a re-read.

The setting is an unnamed isolated coastal region (which I took to be in the UK) during the 2020 lockdown. Our narrator, M, invites a famous artist, L, to stay at the "second place", a renovated cottage on her property which she allows friends and contemporaries to stay in, to work on his painting. M encountered L's work in Paris, and is desperate to get closer to him. After turning down her invite initially, L shows up... but his stay doesn't go quite as M predicted it. L brings a young woman, Brett, with him, and the cast of characters - M's husband, Tony, her adult daughter and her boyfriend - all have their lives impacted and upended by the visitors. Through this setting and cast of characters Cusk explores a number of themes, by retelling the events and her reaction to them to a character named Jeffers.

The postscript sets out that the book was inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir by Mabel Dodge Luhan about the time D H Lawrence stayed at her property in New Mexico in 1922, and one suspects it would be beneficial to read this book to gain an even greater insight into Second Place.

I wouldn't advise starting here if this is your first experience of Cusk's writing, but established fans will definitely find something to enjoy here.

There’s literary fiction and then there’s literary fiction and typed up this doesn’t have the same effect as when spoken aloud, so how do I describe the sort of self indulgent, preciously worded, overwrought and overwritten work like this? It’s certainly literary in that it goes a long way to showcase the powers and beauty of words and in its efforts to understand and elevate emotions and inner workings of the mind. But very consciously so, reading this book you are constantly aware of the author doing this, the stylistic linguistic tricks don’t disappear into the story, in fact it’s almost as if they use the story as a mere canvas to show themselves off against.
Which still might have worked had the story and its cast not been so fundamentally offputting. So let’s talk about that…there’s a very simple basic plot that involves a middle aged woman who has a nice comfortable wife and a lovely comfortable man to share it with who takes care of her financially and emotionally, but apparently not enough, so that she develops something of a crush on a famous artist and invites him to stay with them, on their property, in the second place they have built just for guests. It’s a sort of thing from a bygone era, when the wealthy got actively involved with the arts by sponsoring (in a way) the artists. And in fact, this is precisely what this book was inspired by Lawrence’s stay with a wealthy NY socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan at her Taos estate. Though one can only hope the real thing was way less convolutedly antagonistic than the fictional account.
L, the artist, known by the mere first initial, is from the get go a giant turd of a person, a precocious prick whose early found fame has apparently liberated him from all manners. At first he tosses the invitation aside, but eventually dire financial circumstances force him to reconsider and so he shows up, with a much younger woman in tow no less and expects to be doted on. And the protagonist of the novel is thrilled to do so. In fact, she relocates her own daughter and her milquetoast of a bf into the main building with her and her ever patient spouse, so that L and his lady might have the privacy they require.
From then on, it’s all about the screwed up group dynamics of this uneven and unpleasant situation. The protagonist never becomes likeable in her fawning adoration of the man who plainly wants nothing to do with her, but use her for her money. L never becomes…well, he doesn’t even come close to likeable, he remains a prick throughout, graduating from precocious to petulant and then descending into his own tragedy too profoundly to be rescued even by money. L’s lack of any semblance of gratitude is only ever as striking as the protagonist’s lack of need for it. She’s driven by something different, something less quantifiable and infinitely sadder.
In the end, they are both tragic in their own ways, though she manages to maintain her unevenly loving marriage as a safety net. L, to the very end, remains unworthy of attention or affection. The note in the end doesn’t do much to rectify that. And yes, I know, I know, it’s dangerous and possibly wrong to view fictional characters through the prism of one’s own morality, but it can’t be helped. We read as we are and as I am, I was appalled by this characters. And not all that enamored by the overdone writing either. There is, objectively, a certain beauty to it, but it’s too much of the same, most meaning and profundity wrapped up in so many words that it’s all but obscured. There are some interesting and well done meditations of the nature of relationships, marriage especially. But overall the affect is mostly muted but the thoroughly unpleasant story.
The book’s official description mentions female fate and male privilege, because of course that’s what you mention nowadays to sell books, but frankly the female in this book is the privileged one and the power games played between her and L have less to do with feminism and wokeness than they do with personal shortcomings of those two as people. The publishers have obviously tried to make the book fit into the contemporary hot button mold, but it’s nowhere near there.
In the end, I can’t remember the last time an obviously well written literary book has made me so angry. The look at me, look at me, look how clever I am with words thing it had going was just much too much. And who the f*ck is Jeffers? Why is the entire stupid thing addressed to Jeffers who never makes an appearance or is mentioned otherwise? Is it to justify the epistolary form? Is Jeffers the one who gets and enjoys this sort of thing? Well, good for Jeffers. I’m out of here. At least this book had the decency to be short. Definitely an acquired taste. Thanks Netgalley.

Second Place is much more accessible than what I’ve come to expect from Rachel Cusk, but I leave this novel, once again, feeling like I don’t perfectly understand what she’s trying to tell me. I will say that this is incredibly interesting: an interesting format (epistolary) that makes for interesting observations (on art, motherhood, the burdens of femininity, male freedom) while tracing out an interesting plot (which is, apparently, based loosely on real events in the lives of some famous artists). I was intensely interested throughout this entire short read and ended the experience feeling enriched; Cusk is a master at her craft and this is undeniably art.

The unreliable narrator of this novel harbors a dark secret - but what is it? It's the puzzling nature of the human soul and how it is pondered in this text that renders the book so intriguing. As the story progresses, one wonders more and more what happened to "M", a 50-year-old writer, who lives remotely in the marshes with her down-to-earth, nature-loving husband Tony. She invites a famous painter who is down on his luck to join them in their second humble dwelling (that's the literal meaning of the title, but as this is Cusk, the term "second place" has many more layers), and soon enough, there are four visitors on the grounds, two directly bringing back haunting memories from the past, two mirroring M's fears and insecurities...

Fear is a big topic in this book. Rachel Cusk takes no prisoners when she evokes hallucinatory images and gothic twists that point at a trauma deeply buried in M's consciousness; M wrestles with an overwhelming sense of being treated unjustly, a sense of infuriating helplessness and invisibility as a female literary creator. While her husband Tony "didn't believe in art - he believed in people, (...), in nature", the visiting painter represents reckless creation without any consideration for others (at least at first). In an afterword, Cusk states that the story owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir by Mabel Dodge Luhan about the time D. H. Lawrence visited her in New Mexico, and Cusk sees "Second Place" as a tribute to Luhan's spirit.

"Second Place", much like the Outline-trilogy, is a treasure chest for readers who love labyrinths and puzzles: There is A LOT to find here, ideas, motifs, riddles, images...it's the whole extravaganza, and it's great fun to dive into it. M is the central figure and remains both closest to the reader and furthest away. She tells the whole story to the enigmatic Jeffers - and us, of course, and herein lies her key to freedom: "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." By telling her tale, she makes us see her.

I was unbelievably pleased to receive a free copy of Second Place by Rachel Cusk from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I'd devoured the trilogy (Outline, Transit and Kudos) when they came out so I was very eager to read this and finished it in two days (I had to work in between or I would have finished in one sitting - it's short - 128pp).

Second Place did not disappoint. It is a first rate book.

Cusk's words glide. In lesser hands, this tale would be a boring story about an unlikely bunch of strangers thrust together during lockdown, but she writes some really beautiful sentences, pontificates on some interesting themes (there is just as much to be said about what you thought you happen as about what actually did) and poses serious existential questions with grace, and ease and humour.

Second Place transcends her usual literary fiction, feminist auto-fiction boundaries and matures into something that is almost spiritual without being preachy or overtly religious.

Hers is the voice of the silenced middle-aged woman, and her mission is to make woman seen, whole, even when they cannot make themselves seen and compartmentalise themselves on auto pilot.

Her themes and motifs are: freedom (in all its forms), the shackles of middle age ennui and a detailed exploration of fate, free will and control issues.

The book opens with our protagonist M conversing with a silent, non participatory character called Jeffers*, who is used as a framing device for structuring the plot and pace. We only learn her initial-name when she starts corresponding with L and we never find out the rest of their names. All the other characters have full names.

M is recalling a time when she invited a famous artist (referred to only as L) to her home in the marshes
(I guessed maybe Norfolk Broads?) to do art. She was previously so moved by work of his that she wanted him to impart the beauty of the marshes through his work so he can see what she sees and she can see what she sees through his art. She wanted his art to speak to her again, she wanted to will it to speak to her again.

L arrives, but not according to plan. The saga unfolds against the backdrop of the Covid 19 pandemic although it is only alluded to and used as a vehicle for progressing/forcing the action. It does not take centre stage.

With the L and the devil incarnations, I suspected L was Lucifer (because of the religious overtones) but it turns out to be an homage to Mabel Dodge Luhan's 1932 memoir of the time when D. H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico, ten years earlier in 1922. Cusk's account is set almost 100 years later. Although the same type of strained and sometimes tense visit is evoked, and it's very atmospheric, there is some departure in this version. L does not encourage M to be creative in any way (he cannot bear to be around her) yet D.H Lawrence did encourage Luhan to write and reveal her creative spirit which resulted in Lorenzo in Taos.

M and Luhan both were both patrons of the art (although M is fictional) who surrounded themselves with art in nature and the arts and culture. They regularly invited artists to their home to revel in the natural beauty and to be inspired by it.

In Cusk's version – in which the Lawrence figure is a painter, not a writer but still an artist - it chronicles the transaction between a patron of the arts and the willing, yet not always grateful parasitic artist.

*Jeffers, although it's not mentioned in the book, was a contemporary and friend of D.H Lawrence's and a poet
in his own right, Robinson Jeffers. He was also invited to Luhan's place, the first place, but seemingly not to M's place, the second place. (This is conjecture on my part).

Jeffers may have been the better house guest. Like M, Jeffers idolised solitude, and writing about the difficulty and beauty of nature. Like Jeffers, M frequently quoted from classical literature. His poetry existed beyond the confines of poetic structure, mirroring her struggles with what freedom means in practise.

Second Place is an interesting title because of the predating account set in Mexico and the implications of being somewhat inferior, second best, a consolation prize and indeed L does turn down the initial offer to come and visit one summer due to getting a better offer.

"I decided to go someplace else. Someone I know has an island. It's meant to be some sort of paradise."

When he does arrive, L is physically disgusted by M, and refuses to acknowledge her as a sexual being or as an equal. or sit anywhere near her. As a result she has to constantly remind herself that she is not unattractive, that she has value, that his criticism of her can be countered by a second opinion.

The writing glides and is hypnotic; there is no other way to describe it. The reader is very much drawn into this very vivid and alive place, the marsh. M's character is not dissimilar to Elizabeth Strout's, Olive Kitteridge, in that it is a frumpy middle aged woman who is a bit set in her ways and jealous of the youth but there are also extremely funny moments that couldn't have been penned through younger mouthpieces, like when the guest criticised the bed linen or when they are subjected to a 2 hour reading of an unfinished first draft of a manuscript or the time a therapist fled from her after a chance meeting on a street.

A recurring theme is freedom, although it was slightly overdone. M percolates on and on about the meaning and essence of freedom. She's obsessed with it as a concept even though it's different for everyone and even manifests differently for all the characters in the book. Nevertheless, she cannot get enough of it, or stop telling Jeffers about it.
Tony, her husband is free, but only in a way that would not be pleasing to M.
L is free, because of the good fortune that he happened to not be born a woman, but he will never recognise this privilege, the liberty that comes with this.
M realises that a loss of control can be a type of freedom, as is being in control. M herself feels a surge of freedom, right before she does something very foolish and almost risks everything. Recklessness can feel like freedom too, it seems.

Yet somehow the freedom motif, which is so vast that it could lend itself to broader critical analyses that could spill on for several pages, somehow it doesn't get entangled with the pandemic in any way, as though this version of freedom outranked the lockdown and the restrictions.

The only explanation for not using this resource is that Jeffers, rather than stifling yawns at her rants, agreed. He believed that transcending conflict required human concerns to be de-emphasized in favour of the boundless whole. Perhaps Cusk felt the pandemic was too trivial to mention, that the little freedoms we were denied in 2020 were out of step with transcendental mores. This is in keeping Jeffers' belief that humankind is too self-centered (we are) and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things", and that humans should de-centre themselves.

Perhaps Cusk wanted this to be timeless and more than a guidebook on what to do to entertain yourself and guests in a pandemic but an abstract guide to recognising what "I am here" means to different people yet departs from true transcendentalism because it does not show that humans are at their best when truly self-reliant.

This little book is immediate, arresting and very thought-provoking.

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“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 them 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!” What a stunning opening. There’s a lot to unpack here but I like that about Cusk’s work the many layered ideas, that seem to unfold time in a way… makes for a pleasurable reading experience, one that makes me feel as if I’ve done something to contribute to the bank account of my inner life.

Rachel Cusk got inspiration for this fable-like novel from a real situation, but it's better not to know more than that. Her writing is eerily haunting, and her style, elliptical, but the story flows smoothly and the characters are sometimes charming sometimes exasperating. As with most of her work, I find I can't put it down, but she respects her readers and leaves a lot up to them.

4.5, rounded up.

Cusk's 'Outline' trilogy, the only other works of hers I've read, made my top reads list of 2018, and this new novel will squeak in for this year's list also. It's a dense and thought-provoking read. and would benefit, I believe from a second close reading, in order to plum all its depths (as it was, I went back and re-read the first chapter once I'd finished, in order to settle some nagging questions I had left).

Much like the trilogy, I suspect this is a work of auto-fiction, although our narrator here, known only as 'M', is not quite the same persona as Faye of the earlier works. The title alone has at least three, if not four 'meanings', and often I had to go back over passages to make sure I was gleaning what the author intended. So this is NOT a 'light read', but it certainly rewards the reader's attention, and often borders on sheer brilliance. I hope it gets as much critical and awards attention as her early works merited.

Sincere thanks to F S & G and Netgalley for the ARC, in exchange for this honest and enthusiastic review.