Fiction: How to master daily life? You don't. Not even the best plan works - the weather, the traffic, the screaming children, the guilt . . . the hours take over. Then the next day begins, and it starts all over again. English writer Rachel Cusk's sixth, and most assured, novel to date should be depressing fare, particularly as it includes so many home truths - but it isn't.
This is humorous, at times wildly funny and always sharply, intelligently, fluidly written. Its themes are panic, rage and regret. You may not exactly love her characters, but you won't hate them either. You probably know them; they might represent parts of you, maybe all of you. This in itself is interesting, as there are no martyrs, no saints, no villains, just people trying to make something out of the chaos they find themselves in.
The chaos is not that of a war zone, or of poverty. There is not even all that much loss. No disease. Mortality is hinted at mainly in the form of sagging bodies and ongoing depression. The only deaths occur off-stage, that of a 93-year-old grandmother and the memory of a long dead pet rabbit. More chillingly, there is the ongoing news story of the day, the disappearance of a child - whose body is eventually found. This is the device that brings the action, much of it comic, to some level of reality. Yet even that all-too- familiar reality does not significantly impose itself, such is the self-absorption created by that thing called domesticity.
The women in this most coherent of novels are mothers, no longer objects of desire. They are the defeated generals of households run riot. Always tired, usually stressed and at times bitter, these women fear age and are at the mercy of a resourceful enemy: their children. They are hunting for the girls they used to be, for the bodies they used to have. Some of them dress in tracksuits, the new uniform capable of dealing with infant vomit and spilled food. There is also Juliet, a teacher and a former star pupil, who is now dogged by a sense of having failed to fulfil her promise. She is also obsessed by what she sees as the tyranny of men who, by their every act, destroy women. It is not surprising that she tells her English class: "Wuthering Heights is not a book about love . . . It's a book about revenge."
The husbands act as if their homes are battlefields. When one of them returns from work, he sometimes "looked for a second like he thought he had walked into the wrong house". This is Dom, whose wife, Maisie, although not the central focus of the book, is probably the most interesting character. She is a kind of refugee, a displaced person who has moved from London to a place called a suburb. She has entered a world in which the main diversion is the local shopping mall, where the despairing gather for their main diversion, shopping.
Maisie, the newcomer, accompanies loud, chirpy Christine and the calmly contented Stephanie, two of the established residents, to the shopping mall. She remains alert but passive until they are about to go home. In the car-park "a big black four-wheel-drive car, lavishly shiny, ablaze with lights, clouds billowing from its exhaust like smoke from a dragon's nostrils, began to reverse out of its parking space, and Christine saw a look of horror fly into Maisie's face, and saw her lunge forward silently - she did commend her for this, it being an article of panic to shout at children in the path of danger - in order to grab Jasper beneath the arms and lift him out of the way as the car made its black, barge-like progress out onto the road."
Christine continues watching. Maisie holds the little boy up to the driver's window, "as Christine had seen on the news people in war zones holding up the bodies of dead children at the passing tanks". Christine also notes that Maisie is shouting, and that she is shouting "things that Christine couldn't hear". For Christine it all seems a big fuss over nothing, but the incident is one of the most telling in the entire novel and Cusk later, quite brilliantly, returns to it.
In many ways, this novel is not all that original. Many writers have used the device of a tale spanning a single day from the perspective of several characters. Cusk has taken a group of neighbours who have known each other over a number of years and added the spouses that entered their world. There are also, in Maisie Carrington and her husband, Dom, newcomers from afar - well, London, the city. The narrative centres largely on this core group and how they end up at Christine's slap-happy supper party, which ends in near-disaster when she remembers the lemon tart, still in its wrapping, only as the guests are leaving.
But there are also interludes that read almost as individual short stories, such as the story of Solly Kerr-Leigh, who takes to renting out the spare room. A succession of female lodgers come and go: the happy-go-lucky type, the tragic loner and, ultimately, the Italian career woman, elegant, beautifully dressed, a reminder to Solly of the femininity she has forsaken in the pursuit of motherhood. Elsewhere, Amanda has retreated into a fastidious self-hatred in which her only true companion is her car.
Cusk, one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, is good on exasperation and the details that create domestic chaos. Arlington Park is not smug or knowing, and it is as shrewdly observed as it is funny. Its stressed characters emerge as individuals, not stereotypes. It all adds up to a different kind of English state-of-the-nation social comedy. The narrative is alive with subtle social nuance. There are also the bones and much of the flesh of a good television script, and that is meant as a compliment, not a criticism.
Arlington Park By Rachel Cusk Faber, 240pp, £14.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
