In her 2012 memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, Rachel Cusk pinpointed a dilemma familiar to all warring couples. Her idea about why the marriage failed didn’t match her husband’s. “My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously… It was his story, and lately I have come to hate stories.”
That revelation about storytelling marked a turning point for Cusk as a writer, as well as a wife. Here was a successful, prize-winning novelist questioning the point of fiction. It no longer made sense, Cusk said, “making up John and Jane and having them do things together”—worse, it was embarrassing. She wasn’t alone in feeling this discomfort, which has fuelled the rise of “autofiction”—novels based on what actually happened to the author—by writers like Karl Ove Knausgård and Sheila Heti. Cusk’s response has been the most interesting, though, and her trilogy—Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018)—represents a radical reimagining of the novel. Instead of using a collection of characters to advance the protagonist’s “story,” a technique favoured by novels for the last 500 years, the narrator, Faye, steps back and almost out of the action.
We learn that she is an author, does some teaching, goes to literary festivals and is struggling to renovate a flat. Otherwise, Faye exists only as a conduit for the stories of people she meets, reporting them in detail and without comment, almost as though for official purposes. The characters speak at length, unmediated by a narrator, whose “outline” is filled up by their experiences and ideas. It’s an act of extreme withdrawal or asceticism, perhaps partly in response to the hostile reaction from some quarters to Aftermath. Cusk spoke then of the lure of silence or self-erasure. Here was a way to write and be silent.
Of course, the Outline trilogy is no less artificial than any other fiction, because the stories are still made up by Cusk. Moreover, the characters are barely differentiated, speaking with the same voice, displaying the same curiosity and the same articulacy when talking about philosophy. Cusk shows them as nothing more than a foil for her own interests. She makes explicit the ventriloquism that pretends to hide itself in more traditional novels.
Something similar applies in her new novel Second Place, although here the narrative comes closer to a conventional plot: a couple’s life is thrown into upheaval after they invite a famous artist to stay in their guest cottage. Readers will realise straight away that there’s something odd about the narrator—never mind “unreliable,” she’s clearly in the grip of an existential crisis. Some childhood trauma has severely interfered with her sense of self: “If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist. The criticism is more real than you are: it seems, in fact, to have created you. I believe a lot of people walk around with this problem in their heads, and it leads to all kinds of trouble—in my case, it led to my body and my mind getting divorced from each other right at the start, when I was only a few years old.”
M (we never know her full name) derives some stability now from the love of a good man—Tony—and an adult daughter she mostly gets on well with, although in the past her instability caused her to lose custody of this child. M lives in a beautiful area, near marshes, close to the coast, as did Cusk, in a stunning “eco-house” in Norfolk, while she was writing the book. This marshy landscape provides the canvas on which M seems to shift in and out of visibility, frustratingly hard to place. There’s an old-fashioned feel to her strange, exalted voice. She speaks in clichés—“first and foremost,” “I for one”—and is partial to an exclamation mark. In the mornings she leaps out of bed ready “to build Rome in a day.” At the same time, like the characters in Outline, she is unusually articulate when it comes to discussing philosophy. Her thoughts and conversations head quickly in the direction of Jung or Nietzsche, less surprising here than in Outline, as we learn she has undergone psychoanalysis. What is more, M has been diagnosed with an “authority complex,” which, according to the Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, is when “a person projects power onto certain other people and experiences inferiority in their presence.”
I didn’t know, until I reached the endnote, that Second Place is inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s account of the visits paid by DH Lawrence to her estate in Taos, New Mexico, in the early 1920s. (This information is part of the publicity in some territories, but not in the UK.) Luhan was a wealthy art lover in thrall to the landscape and indigenous culture of this remote part of the US and married to a Native American called Tony. A fervent admirer of Lawrence, she “summoned him across continents” to join her in this utopia, to experience a “new dawn” for humanity and to write a novel about it and her. She wanted to inspire genius in Lawrence and in turn be inspired, “for a woman cannot and never will be able to do anything without a man, who releases her into creative action.” Lawrence himself believed that women had the power to effect male creativity, while not being creative themselves.
Lawrence answered the call, taking his wife Frieda with him, but the relationship with his hosts quickly became volatile; he developed a hatred for Luhan, calling her a “vampire” on his creativity and threatening to murder her. Somehow their relationship survived the turbulence and inspired Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent, as well as several short stories. He continued to visit Taos, once bringing his aristocratic friend Dorothy Brett, and wrote to Luhan not long before his death, suggesting they might yet together “begin a new life, with real tenderness in it.”
Open Luhan’s four-volume memoir on any page and the same voice Cusk recreates in Second Place jumps out. The paranoia and exaltation—even the exclamation marks!—are all there. So Second Place is a reimagining of Luhan and Lawrence’s story, transposed to 21st-century Norfolk and with the transatlantic journey reversed. M summons a famous American artist—“L”—to stay in their “second place” to “find a way of capturing the ineffability of the marsh landscape, and thereby unlock and record something of my own soul.” The “second place” refers both to this guest cottage and to M’s sense of inferiority as a woman.
“Can metafiction work for readers who don’t ‘get’ the references? When the author is as interesting as Rachel Cusk, the answer is yes”
Like Lawrence, L proves elusive, and when he does eventually arrive it’s in the company of a rich and beautiful woman called Brett. As soon as she meets them, M feels her life is about to collapse. The guests are rude and unpredictable, the household grapples with a quiet, unfathomable violence. L is inexplicably aggressive. He refuses to paint M because he says he can’t “see” her, so compounding her terror of invisibility and unreality. Daughter Justine’s boyfriend reports that L “intends to destroy you.” And M wonders if, rather than artistic expression, destruction is what she truly desires. “It seemed to me that this was the form freedom took out of necessity, the final form when every other attempt to attain it had failed. I didn’t know what this violence was or how it could be inflicted, only that something in L’s threat seemed to promise it.”
Several truculent episodes in the novel reconstruct events and conversations that took place between Lawrence and the Luhans in 1920s Taos, including, at its climax, a frightening encounter that triggers M’s physical collapse.
It’s clever, but does it work, this transposition of historical and esoteric arguments into modern literature? Readers may feel, perhaps as they did with Olivia Laing’s Crudo (an autofiction that drew on the life of writer Kathy Acker), that they are missing something if they don’t know the original material. Can metafiction work just as well for readers who don’t “get” the references as it does for the cognoscenti?
When the author is as original and interesting as Rachel Cusk, the answer is a qualified yes. I got more out of Second Place after investigating Lorenzo in Taos, but that is easily done, after all. Where once authors could assume a reader’s knowledge of the Bible or classical mythology, now they can count on an internet connection.
As a study of existential dread, Cusk’s experimental novel stands comparison with classics by Camus or Sartre. It also provides an interesting angle on her own queasiness as a novelist. We might wonder if M’s “authority complex” has a counterpart in Cusk’s own quandaries about authorship and the morality of making up stories. When I saw her speak two years ago in London, Cusk said, rather regretfully, that she was unlikely to write another novel.
Her solution here is a disquisition on real events, one that both answers the call put out 100 years ago by Mabel Dodge Luhan and finds its own resolution. Tony, the moral centre of this novel, as was his model in Taos, seems bound to provide M with the grounding in reality she craves. The “second place” is a parallel world, he assures her, an alternative reality—and we are left to wonder if L and his companion Brett are the unreal ones, representing dark forces in M’s personality which she can overcome.
I’ve met Cusk twice, once at a literary festival where we were doing events. She was promoting A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, which had already proved controversial with its unsentimental description of raising small children. I was pregnant with my second child. “It’s going to be awful,” she said bluntly. Briefly shocked—who offers bad tidings on the birth of a child?—I found I admired her disarming honesty. Among modern writers, it’s a quality unique to Cusk.
Our first encounter was 10 years earlier, when we were both students. She had come to drop a mutual friend off at the building where I lived in Edinburgh and they weren’t certain which was my flat. I must have called out of the kitchen window to confirm my friend had arrived at the right place. Cusk stood on the street below my second-floor flat, tall and slight, an inscrutable figure, dressed in black. Whenever I remember this encounter Cusk seems to get further away, and now, in my mind’s eye, she’s about 10 floors down, distant and enigmatic. The uncertainty is what makes her so interesting. Ever inventive, Cusk keeps pushing the novel into new terrain. Can we even see her? She seems to move in and out of view.
Second Place by Rachel Cusk (Faber, £14.99)
