A few years ago, I attended a literary awards ceremony in Toronto where Rachel Cusk, one of the shortlisted authors, arrived wearing the most stunning white dress. Being an unreconstructed middle-aged man, I dared to compliment her on her outfit and she surprised me by saying that it was, in fact, her wedding dress. I was reminded of this while reading Second Place when M, a novelist, goes to have her portrait painted by L, and chooses her own wedding dress for the sitting. Sadly, the garment in question does not appear to bring luck, as Cusk didn’t win the prize and M is confronted by something so upsetting that it’s among the highlights of the book.
Having read most of Cusk’s novels, and being aware of her propensity for transplanting scenarios from her life into her fiction, I found myself wondering who the painter at the heart of the story was, for he’s a figure of such narcissism and arrogance that I assumed he must be out there somewhere, annoying people.
Not so, however, as an afterword explains the novel owes a debt to an arts patron’s memoir of DH Lawrence’s stay with her in 1930s New Mexico. If summer guests are anything like Lawrence or L, then I will be keeping my Seomra firmly off bounds to visitors this year, even when social-distancing rules are lifted.
When a writer has completed a highly acclaimed sequence of novels, it must be both liberating and terrifying to start over with a blank canvas. Cusk’s Faye trilogy – Outline, Transit and Kudos – was narrated by a writer negotiating the often murky territory of the literary world, from festivals to creative writing classes, while charting a path between entitled men and overlooked women. The trilogy was a huge success, the equal of Edward St Aubyn’s better-known Patrick Melrose sequence.
Unlike St Aubyn, however, who has deliberately moved on to new terrain, Cusk seems less willing to leave the past behind for M, a writer, an introvert, a highly self-critical mother, and a person connected to the world while apparently deeply suspicious of it, reads like a reincarnation of Faye.
The novel is set in an English marshland where M and her husband Tony live. They own a nearby cottage – the “second place” of the title – to which they occasionally invite creative types, promising seclusion or company, whatever the artist prefers. Having had a powerful reaction to a series of L’s paintings she saw in a Paris gallery, M invites him and, after some amusing to-ing and fro-ing, he accepts, arriving with a young woman, Brett. Her presence upsets M, for while she has not planned an affair with L, she has hoped for his complete attention. “She was lodged like a giant splinter in my life,” M remarks. “And I had no idea how or when I was going to prise her out.”
‘The test of compassion’
While there is a certain tension in the air even before the painter’s arrival, it’s aggravated by his presence. M falls out with Tony, her daughter’s romance with a tedious boyfriend cools down, and all the time L is painting, or not painting, and driving M mad both with interest and irritation. There are witty sequences – the young boyfriend, Kurt, reads aloud from a terrible novel he’s writing and doesn’t draw breath for two hours. “Be careful what you ask people to endure,” L cautions afterwards, a remark that should be printed in large letters on literary stages around the world.
There are some fine lines too – “The truest test of a person is the test of compassion’ – but somehow the overall effect feels less powerful than it did before, perhaps because the reader feels that a story that has been brilliantly told and has reached a natural ending has somehow come back to life, but without quite the complexity or daring of the original.
Thematically, there is much to admire. Cusk writes about art as if she doesn’t entirely trust it, resenting the power it has to dominate a life. It’s particularly telling that M does no work at all during the painter’s visit, while others thrive. In fact, she just sits around, observing, “with just a little more to do than my usual nothing”.
Second Place is a good novel by a great novelist but it suffers from comparisons to the earlier books, simply because they are too alike in tone. That said, criticising a Rachel Cusk book is like carping about a disappointing movie from a favourite filmmaker; it may not reach the heady heights we’ve come to expect, but it’s still pretty much better than anything else out there.
John Boyne’s new novel, The Echo Chamber, will be published in August (Doubleday)
