Rachel Cusk, Second Place (I)

 

This evening, in preparation for a meeting of my book group coming up this Friday,  I finished re-reading Rachel Cusk's book Second Place. I had read it for the first time back in November and found it intriguing. Here are some of the preliminary notes I made at that time:

The Cusk book was inward and awkward and psychologically astute in ways that I have come to expect from her. The narrator is M, a middle-aged woman who has had a long-time fixation on a painter she refers to only as L, whose work spoke to her when she first saw it when she was a young woman. Now she's living with her husband Tony along a marsh on a farm of sorts that has an extra cottage called the Second Place. She winds up writing a number of times to the artist asking him if he'd like to visit; she thinks he would find the landscape inspiring, as she does. She also seems to be entertaining the hope that they will become friends, if not lovers. She hears nothing for a long time. Then she gets word that he is coming, and when he shows up, he's not alone; he's brought along a beautiful young woman named Brett. Most of the book has to do with the time he spends there, and the various disconnects between the narrator and L. There are subplots involving her daughter Justine and her husband Kurt, who have moved in just before L arrives. Justine is befriended by Brett, Kurt spends a period of time as a kind of assistant to Tony on the farm, and L navigates a series of psychological and physical crises, including a having, toward the end of the book, a stroke that radically re-shapes his life and the lives of all the people around him. The bulk of the book consists of interior monologue  rendered as direct address toward someone identified only as Jeffers. We're inside the narrator's head the whole time, but the conceit is that M is not talking to us, she's talking to Jeffers, and we are thus in the oddly oblique position of seeming to be listening in on the one-sided conversation. M is clearly a very intelligent and articulate woman who as a narrator and the conduct of her life is ruthless in pursuit of existential understanding. Her upbringing and the events of her life have led her to be suspicious of men on the one hand and family on the other. Her hopes and expectations of finding some formula for freedom and happiness in her life are more or less consistently thwarted by her own impulsive behaviors and insecurities. I liked the feel of the book as I was reading it, the way that the narrative never seemed to move in the ways in might be expected to move, but was insistently making its own way in its own time. It's the kind of book that would necessitate re-reading, and some not insignificant amount of study, to fully appreciate. I may go down that road, I'm not sure. At least enough to pull some quotes and think them over. Cusk has some interesting things to say about being a woman and about being an artist and about how hard it is to make sense of anything when you are in the middle of it.

I guess I'd say after a second reading that I feel the same way, only more so. There are, as Francis Bacon famously noted, lots of ways of to read. ("...some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested"). This is a book that I suppose can be read for pleasure. That's the way I read it the first time. I was intrigued by these particular characters in this particular situation, and I was reading mostly to find out what happened. Which was fine at the time. But on second reading, knowing what was going to happen, I was much more attuned to the multi-layered psychological dynamics of the characters individually and in their interactions with one another: M and Justine. M and Tony. M and L. Brett and Tony. Brett and M. Justine and Kurt. Tony and L. And so on. I feel like for me to fully grok what is going on in the book, I'm going to have to go back and start pulling quotes that relate to particular themes and laying them out on paper and making charts and graphs in order to be able to figure them out. In other words, to be the reader that this book needs me to be, I've got a lot of work to do, quite probably more work than many readers would likely want to sign up for. Cusk is a thoughtful, demanding writer, and my sense is that there are rewards to be had in meeting her halfway.


So fine. But wait, there's more. As it turns out—and this is something I did not become aware of until I was halfway through my second reading of the book—the basic plot of Cusk's book has been appropriated from Lorenzo in Taos, an early 20th century novel by an American writer I had never heard of named Mabel Dodge Luhan. (Apparently, in at least one of the editions of Second Place there is an endnote in which Cusk acknowledges the primary source that she is working from. But that endnote does not appear in my paperback version of the text, and so I wasn't aware of it until I started perusing the reviews of Second Place.) Cusk uses the scaffolding of that book's plot in much the same way that Barbara Kingsolver uses David Copperfield as the template for Demon Copperhead, which I put aside midway through in order to re-read Second Place. So if I really wanted to do my due diligence, I suppose I would need to read Lorenzo in Taos as well. Not sure that's gonna happen. Obsessive-compulsive as I may be, I have to set myself some limits, especially inasmuch as I have a stack of about twenty other books waiting for me on my nightstand.

Anyway this is my preliminary attempt to process Second Place. My tentative plan is to do some of that culling and graphing and charting, then talk with my group, and come back with some further thoughts next week. Till then...