Fiction: Rachel Cusk is one of several writers on the new Granta list of Best Young British Novelists who, you suspect, is uneasy with belonging to this particular club, as if it implies a kind of worthy uniformity, writes Giles Newington.
A winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award for Saving Agnes and author of the "controversial account of becoming a mother", A Life's Work (for which she is better known at present than her fiction), Cusk seems alert to accusations of predictability and keen to distance herself from shared metropolitan literary attitudes. In a recent Observer interview, as if to pre-empt any accusation of soft-centredness, she claimed to be "incredibly angry all the time".
The anger can certainly be felt in the powerful opening section of The Lucky Ones, in which Kirsty, wrongly imprisoned for murder, reflects on her bleak life in the sink estate where she grew up. Kirsty is trying to conceal from the warders the fact that she is about to give birth to the child who could be her ticket to more bearable accommodation. Securing her relative freedom, however, is dependent on the expertise of her lawyer, Victor Porter, who, unknown to Kirsty, is terminally ill.
Victor and his columnist wife, Serena, are the background characters linking the book's five stories, which, as seems to be the flavour of the moment (The Hours, Personal Velocity), are otherwise unconnected except in their central themes: whether or not to have children, what role men should play in bringing them up, what has been lost and gained in modern attitudes to family and work.
The pace slackens sharply in the second story, as we go on a skiing holiday with Victor's young assistant, Jane, and her well-heeled companions. The contrast with Kirsty's predicament is stark and reveals a facet of Cusk's anger; Jane has messed up Kirsty's case and gone into less demanding corporate work because she has decided life "is allowed to be fun, you know".
The heart sinks a little when the action thenceforth homes in on Ravenley, one of those remote, wealthy, timeless villages that sometimes seem only to exist in English novels. In fact, though, it is here that Cusk's voice is at its purest and most exact, in the interior worlds of Mrs Daley (the mother of all warlike conservative matriarchs) and Vanessa, the dogged but dissatisfied parent of two young sons, who has to reassess her attitudes when her patronising husband reneges on the assumptions that have held them together.
What distinguishes this section of the book is the precise, controlled way Cusk renders her characters' feelings and thought processes; there is a touch of Virginia Woolf in the way she pins down the sensations and associations other people inspire. Vanessa dispassionately observes her disappointed husband as he stands around ("parked there like a car"), sleeps ("like something discarded in a hurry and flung on the floor") or leaves his traces on the domestic environment she dominates ("Colin's crumpled pyjamas lay across the bed, like the discarded skin of a snake"). The scenes between Vanessa, Serena and Victor, who has moved to Ravenley to die, are especially well-observed, with each of the characters influenced and altered by the others' outlooks.
Cusk's characters are trying to break free of the assumptions, agendas and circumstances that define them, and to find their own way forward. Perhaps their creator is going through the same process, resisting enlistment.
Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist
The Lucky Ones. By Rachel Cusk, Fourth Estate, 228pp, £15.99