The Bradshaw Variations

http://abookofadifferentcolor.blogspot.com

Usually, I don't like and try to avoid books that are just about stuff. Books that are just about people's lives but are magnificently well written are not my usual read. I must have been in the right frame of mind today because I really enjoyed this book. For example, Jonathan Franzen's style is very similar to Cusk's, but not once during this book did I want to throw it across the room and refuse to finish it. Unlike Franzen, Cusk's characters are full - they have a round, three-dimensional quality to them that makes them pop off the page.

Check out my full review at: http://abookofadifferentcolor.blogspot.com ( )

I always know what I’m getting into with a Rachel Cusk novel – lots of high brow musing, a sort of intellectualising of everyday life, and some moments that speak perfect truth about families and the way people interact. This book was no exception. The only difficulty I find is that for every moment of crystal-clarity there are paragraphs of musings that I could not comprehend even if I had several lifetimes in which to ponder over them.

Similar to Arlington Park in its obsessive analysis and fearsome – sometimes off-putting – intelligence, The Bradshaw Variations focuses on the members of a family, shining its spotlight on each of them for brief periods. The chapters are shorter, though, so if the thread is lost it is easy to start anew a few pages later.
Though the central focus is on a husband and wife who have agreed on a role reversal with him becoming a house-husband, these were the characters I found hardest to understand, picture or like. Far better were the brother and sister-in-law Howard and Claudia, and their dog who frankly stole the show. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Although a little of such stuff goes a long way for me, I do in fact quite enjoy the occasional literary-oriented novel, one that eschews plot developments almost entirely to instead exist as merely a complex character study; take for example veteran character author Rachel Cusk's latest, The Bradshaw Variations, which is not much more than a probing look at an upper-middle-class British family whose spouses spend a year switching roles (the full-time mom enters the world of academic senior management, while the corporate dad spends a year re-engaging in his youthful passion for classical piano), and what kind of effect this has on the family in general, which by extension becomes a look at what the lives are like of their related siblings and their own upper-middle-class British families. As such, then, it's not really Cusk's point to have a lot of stuff "happen," and those who need such a thing in their novels will be profoundly disappointed with this one; it's instead a dense look at the multiple layers of personality that make up each of these fully-realized people, which by the end becomes a deep slice-of-life look at what being a Western middle-classer in the early 2000s is really all about in the first place. A great pick for those who like their literature academic and slow-moving in nature, but that should absolutely be avoided by everyone else.

Out of 10: 8.6 ( )

If you need to be driven by plot, this will not be your novel. If you enjoy good writing and a cerebral look at a microcosm of a family's year, you will enjoy Cusk's latest effort. We see the interior lives of the Bradshaw family, particularly Thomas, Tonie and their daughter Alexa. Each of their lives invites examination as they move through a year of change - Thomas is not working and is absorbed in music, Tonie is promoted without desiring it and Alexa absorbs the changes in her parents. On the periphery are Thomas' family, each in their own state of flux. ( )

I have liked all of Cusk's novels so perhaps I have a relationship with her that skews me to forgive/appreciate her rather more than the previous reviewers here. The things they complain about are not necessarily negatives for me - I am not a plot driven reader and I like cerebral when it is written in such clear and perceptive prose. I usually avoid morose writing but I find this bracing rather than depressing. I do get weary of middle class, middle aged angst and this may be a bit too much like a achingly cold French film at times. But then she comes up with such a perfect description of a way of being, a feeling, an abstraction that normally falls outside our perception and it is like I have been given a gift of sight, of seeing things as they are, an 'oh yes' moment. ( )