Second Place

Rachel Cusk’s darkly enigmatic novel Second Place describes the fraught relationship between a middle-aged woman writer (“M”) and a narcissistic, infantile male painter roughly her age or younger (“L”). The story begins years before the main action in Paris, where a youthful M encounters what she calls a “bloated, yellow-eyed devil” on a train and thereafter feels her life’s been contaminated by evil. The next day while wandering the streets of the city she happens upon a gallery where the works of a young artist who’s riding a wave of popularity are being exhibited. L’s work speaks to her in a way that acts as a salve for her experience on the train, and though her life at the time subsequently goes off the rails, show more she does not forget how L’s paintings helped her through. Decades later M is married to Tony, a nurturing, enterprising man very different from her hyper-critical first husband. Tony and M are living an idyll in a marshy coastal district. On their property are two dwellings: the proper house where she and Tony live and a guesthouse a short distance away through the trees that she calls the “second place.” M, not having forgotten how L helped her through a difficult period in her life, has written and invited him to stay with them in the second place. But L cannot immediately take up the offer, and the initial communication is followed by a bit of back and forth that leaves M uncertain if L will ever act on the invitation. In the meantime, M’s adult daughter Justine has arrived with boyfriend Kurt, and M puts them in the second place. But then L writes to say he is coming after all, and Justine and Kurt are forced to relocate to the main house. This sort of egocentric discourtesy is typical of L’s behaviour. Moreover, when he does finally show up, he’s brought with him, unannounced, a young woman, Brett—who, as it turns out, is much more civil and accommodating than her companion. The remainder of Second Place depicts a battle of wills. M simply wants to express gratitude by giving L a place to work in peace. But L seems resentful of M for reaching out to him and suspicious of her motives, as if he thinks her invitation implies that she expects them to forge an intimate connection. He responds to her generosity with hostility, keeping his distance from her, denigrating M in conversation, accusing her of being controlling and destructive. M narrates a brittle, incisive, psychologically devastating story of a problematic relationship in which the two parties never align. Paradoxically, the harder M strives to give L what she thinks he wants, the more defiant and disruptive he becomes. Cusk’s brief novel is in equal measures gripping and disturbing as it relates a taut cautionary tale illustrative of the saying be careful what you wish for. show less

There is so much compressed into 180 pages, I hardly know where to begin to do justice. The main character "M" encounters the work of the artist "L" in a Paris gallery hours before departing on a train (to I forget where, somewhere in Europe) where she is followed from car to car by a leering man with a small child. M is in Paris on her own, taking a brief sabbatical from her marriage and small child, Justine. "L"s work connects her to a vision of what true freedom might be like. The combination of the paintings and the experience on the train propel her from passively accepting to actively demanding the freedom of choosing how to be in the world, but her decision destroys her marriage and for several years her own connection with her show more child.

Many years later M, married again, invites the artist L to come to where she lives now, by the marshes (somewhere like Norfolk) not far from the sea to stay in 'the second place' a formerly derelict cottage that she, with her second husband, Tony, have refurbished. M's marriage to Tony, is good, really good. (Really!) He farms and is grounded as a person. After delay (of years) L arrives with a young woman in tow. It is during the time we are still in, the first year of Covid. M's own daughter, now in her mid-twenties is home along with her German boyfriend Karl.

L's work served as a catalyst to M before and quickly it becomes apparent that L the person is also a catalyst. It's as much in him as in his work.
The spring is unusually warm and dry. L is elusive. M is frustrated. She hardly knows what she wants from him. Nothing. Everything. He avoids her.

Early on M says, "Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?" Watching a bird she says, "Meanwhile I just sit staring straight ahead in front of me with nothing to do. That's all I've managed as far as freedom is concerned, to get rid of the people and things I don't like. After that there isn't all that much left!" and a little further on, "I find it difficult to meet my own needs. The sight of people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without."

About L's paintings she says, that they exude a sense of freedom, "this aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it. and that, as women we grow accustomed to translating it into something we can recognize." -- "a case of borrowed finery."

Of clothes she says, "I was presumably dressed as I always am, in either black or white." "I like to wear soft, draping, shapeless clothes which I can add or remove in layers . . I have never understood clothes terribly well, and have found the element of choice especially unmanageable, so it was a great day for me when I realized . . . that by limiting the colours to black and white I need never think about aesthetics again."

The implication is, in a way, that a woman can only experience freedom by choosing to do empty out, to do and be nothing. Or, that is the route M has taken.

M writes movingly of being a mother. She writes of a time when her daughter was thirteen and asked her what were the limits of her obligations to her. She says, "I believe I am obliged to let you go," I said, once I'd thought about it, "but if that doesn't work out, I believe I am obliged to remain responsible for you forever."

of writing (she is a writer herself, very occasionally) "Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment . . . and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards."

She writes too of some moments in her marriage with Tony when she realizes how differently they see and feel almost everything. When she explains to Tony of her misgivings about calling their cottage 'the second place' she says the term "pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life--that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could hever win, and the reason I couldn't seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless--as the woman I was--to overcome." She goes on to say, "Tony listened to me, and I could tell he was slightly surprised by what I was saying . . and after a long time he said, "For me it doesn't mean that. It means parallel world. Alternative reality."

This woman may appear to do nothing, (you might find her annoying, but then you would find me annoying too) but what she does do is observe and think about the impossible and the forbidden: the possibility that art is both dangerous and completely pointless, to the likelihood that men, being men, even the best of them, cannot begin to comprehend what women's lives are made of, that the surest love for a woman is with her children.

At the very end, unnecessarily perhaps? Cusk reveals that the novel was inspired by the memoir of Mabel Mapes Dodge of D.H. Lawrence's time at her home in Taos. Jeffers, then, is Robinson Jeffers the poet. Not sure what I think about this. Does it add or subtract? I guess I'll have to read [Lorenzo in Taos] to decide. I am not a big Lawrence fan, but I have gleaned that he was just such a person as L, a force of nature.

Sorry this is so long, I am just stunned by Cusk's perceptiveness and courage about women, men, the human condition, art, you name it. ***** show less

It was the name Jeffers that got me first. I knew I had seen it somewhere lately - the spelling was weird enough to make me wonder how can I see it twice in the same year. But I could not place it. I needed another name, Brett, to start wondering if this novel can somehow be connected to the artist colony in Taos. Had I looked at the author note at the end of the novel before I read the whole book, I would have seen Cusk's tribute.

But let's get to the novel: M had settled finally on the border of a marsh with a new husband. But before that she met a painter, L, - met his paintings anyway at a time in her life when her life was a bit messed up. When she married Tony, she found the stability she needed - and they built a second show more house/cabin on their land - called the Second Place. It was supposed to go her daughter but when she moved away it became a refuge for anyone who needs a quiet time to be an artist (of one type or another). That's where our novel opens - with M sending a letter to L to invite him to come to the Second Place - and the story finally takes off when L actually arrives, with Brett in tow, and throws M's ordered life into a disarray.

There is a plot somewhere in there, things do happen but the novel is more concerned with M's thoughts and feelings than with the real life. The whole novel is a set of letters/talks with Jeffers, written/happening after the whole story finished - so there is somewhat of an unreliable narration happening as well - M knows where the story is going so she shapes her story around that.

The novel is an exploration of motherhood and womanhood - M's guilt (sometimes just in being a woman) and thoughts paint a picture which may sound too familiar sometimes. It is curious that the novel does not really have a set timeline - there is a disaster which happened (the Depression?) but it can be set in almost any time - even when Kurt decides to write, he picks up paper and pencil and explains it in the story - we never see a computer or a phone but that does not mean they could not have been there. And yet, with the Taos connection in my mind, that felt like the 20s/30s of the 20th century - even if the text does not get there.

The invitation was meant to heal M but L is not what she really expected - so their relationship is anything but amicable for most of the book. That throws M into memories and flashbacks - when she is not unhappy.

In 1932, Mabel Dodge Luhan published a memoir called "Lorenzo in Taos". It was based on D. H. Lawrence stay in the artist colony in Taos that she was running with her husband. The memoir is written by using the letters between Mabel, Lawrence and Robinson Jeffers (among others). and deals with the relationship between the author, his wife, Mabel and the artist Dorothy Brett. I read a book about the Southwest earlier this year and that's what triggered my memory - I had never read the memoir (but now I want to) but the Taos colony was important in the development of arts in New Mexico and the Southwest. Once that connection finally clicked, a lot of what I had issues with in the novel actually smoothed out - while the novel is not an exact replica of the real-life story, it has a lot of ties into it - some of them quite obvious, some of them a bit more hidden (for example the real life Tony won Mabel by sitting in his teepee every night and drumming, trying to get her to come to her; the novel's Tony wrote letters every day which were "as if he were beating a drum, steadily and without cease").

I am pretty sure that I missed a lot of these connections - especially early in the novel when I had not made the connection and even more because I do not know Mabel's story that well. I plan to read her memoir - I am really curious to see how close the novel is to the real life story.

The novel is a tribute to the spirit of real-life Mabel - a woman that was bigger than life in a time when women were anything but. But I do wonder if that connection did not actually worked the opposite to what the author intended - without the Taos connection, the novel is flat and listless (and M is annoying) - it reads more like an essay on womanhood with somewhat wooden characters; with it, it kinda feels like a retelling which tries too hard to connect the dots without actually repeating the real life story. There are differences and the ending is different and yet... something just does not click cleanly together for me.

I do not read a lot of contemporary novels and I probably would not have picked this one up if it was not for it landing on the Booker long list. Somewhere in the middle of the book I realized that I treat it more as a puzzle than as a novel - trying to find the Taos connections and to figure out the timeline. Which is never a good sign - I expect novels to keep me in the flow of their narrative. But it also seems to be in a style which is modern these days (even if it rarely works for me) so between the language (flowery and beautiful albeit overwritten in places) and the Taos connection, I can see why the literary circles may like it.

I do wonder though if this would not have been a much better book if it was half its length, paired down to a novella. I guess we will never know. show less

Once at a dark point in her life, M stumbled upon a gallery exhibiting works by L. She was transfixed. L’s paintings were like a recognition of oneself, they knew her entirely. Years later when her circumstances had changed and she was living with her second husband, Tony, on a plot of land near the Norfolk marshes, she writes to L offering the use of their guest house, which she and Tony refer to as their “second place”, as a retreat, a studio, a refuge for as long as he might like to make use of it. At some point L takes M up on her offer. He arrives precipitously with an unannounced companion, a much younger woman named Brett, and takes up residence in M’s second place. L is not exactly as M imagined he would be. But what show more exactly was she expecting? It’s a question M asks herself as she writes about this period of her life to a correspondent named Jeffers.

Rachel Cusk’s epistolary novel is meandering and introspective. M is filled with self-doubt but also anger and a kind of wistfulness. Her guard is nearly always up, yet she allows herself to be nearly destroyed by L’s rejection of her sympathies. They are seemingly at loggerheads. But it becomes increasingly clear that M’s desperate desire for L’s acknowledgement threatens to undermine her relationship with Tony and with her adult daughter, Justine, who happens to also be staying with them that summer. And then, perhaps not surprisingly, there is the question of art. For both L and M (she is described as having written “little” books), the wellspring of artistic creation may be personal pain. Is it ever anything more than that? And how does M’s narrative drive, or compulsion, fit in with her conception of artistic truth? And hey, you might be wondering, who the heck is Jeffers?

Not all questions have answers here, not least the one about Jeffers, but M’s understandings and misapprehensions become rhythmically fascinating. She is remarkably opaque to herself, though perhaps not nearly so to her daughter and her husband. At some point you will get a niggle about just how much you want to trust her narrative account to Jeffers of these events and her reported thoughts and feelings.

I liked it. More than I thought I would. And it will keep me thinking for some time.

Recommended. show less

M is a middle-aged writer of modest talent. She is introspective and deeply thoughtful, but also terribly insecure about who she is and what her place is in the world. As she was recovering from an abusive marriage some years ago, she was strongly affected by viewing the paintings of L. Now remarried to her second husband, M decides to invite L to stay and work in the guest house that she and Tony have on their homestead in a remote coastal community. M is hopeful that a visit from L will boost her flagging self-esteem and provide her with the answers to the nagging questions about what is lacking in her life. After initially refusing the invitation, L suddenly appears one day, but with his glamorous and much younger girlfriend in tow. show more Their unexpected arrival requires M’s daughter and her boyfriend to vacate the guest house—or ‘second place’ as M calls it—which adds considerable tension to the situation. Clearly, this visit is not going to be the spiritual renewal that M was hoping for.

So goes the basic story of Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s sparkling novel of male-female relationships, the role that art plays in nurturing our lives, the fraught way in which mothers and daughters interact, the cruelties that we sometimes inflict on one another, and a whole lot more. Written as a long letter to a poet friend, the book reads as a lengthy therapy session in which M works out her frustrations and disappointments with pretty much every aspect of her existence, but most of all her disillusionment with the man L actually is and how little solace he ultimately provides. Although the story itself is well plotted, the work really shines as a character study of at least two complex and very flawed people. And then, of course, there is Cusk’s prose, which is always closely observed and occasionally quite remarkable, starting with the delicious double entendre of the title: the guest house itself becomes an imposing presence in the tale and M clearly feels herself to be in second place as both an artist and a woman.

While Second Place struck me as being wholly original, it actually has an interesting heritage. As the author explains in a brief Afterword, the story was inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of a tense visit that writer D. H. Lawrence and his wife made to her New Mexico estate in 1932 (which explains the M and the L as character names, by the way). Regardless of that connection, this was an emotionally evocative and highly satisfying book to read. It is not a long story in terms of page count, but the philosophical complexity that Cusk creates with her language demands a great deal of attention from the reader; I found myself highlighting many passages throughout the book containing some sentences that were simply stunning. All the more remarkable is how much I enjoyed this novel without actually liking any of the characters (except perhaps for Tony)! That must certainly be one way to define great writing. show less

“This is partly a story of will, and of the consequences of exerting it, you will notice… that everything I determined to happen happened, but not as I wanted it! This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it.

Narrator and protagonist M admires the artwork of famous artist L and invites him to stay in a guest cottage on her property. She lives in a marshy region near the coast. The book opens with M meeting “the Devil” on a train, and this encounter is the catalyst for her invitation to L. She envisions developing show more some type of (unspecified) relationship with him. At first, he spurns her invitation but eventually accepts. Much to M’s surprise, he arrives with a beautiful young woman. M lives in the main house with her second husband, Tony. Her adult daughter and her boyfriend are visiting.

The book is told in epistolary style, addressed to an individual named Jeffers (who plays no other role in the story). It is a character-driven book with little plot. The tone is dark. The writing is striking.

In addition to the literal “second place” (guest cottage), there are references to feeling inferior throughout the narrative. M is a writer but is overshadowed by L’s success as an artist. She feels second in beauty and attraction to the lovely Brett. She feels secondary to her ex-husband in their daughter’s affections. She feels that, as a woman in a creative field, she must overcome more hurdles than a man.

“I said to him that ‘second place’ pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn’t seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome.”

We spend the majority of time in M’s head. She is writing to Jeffers almost as if talking to herself. What she imagines will happen when L comes to stay is not what actually happens. L is a narcissist. He comes across as a rather despicable person.

“I realised, hearing him talk, that he was without any fibre of morality or duty, not out of any conscious decision but more in the way of lacking an elemental sense. He simply couldn’t conceive of the notion of obligation.”

M is not the most admirable character either. She does not appreciate her husband, Tony, though he seems like the most stable and empathetic character in the book. It is a book for those who do not mind unlikeable characters. I found it is easy to admire the writing and the craft. show less

‘Second Place’ by Rachel Cusk absolutely blew me away. It is rich with poignant sentences, observations on life and relationships and a kind of inner interrogation that spoke to my own brand of being. I loved what she was able to do in so few pages.

The book is M, a middle-aged woman, writing to or speaking with her friend Jeffers about her experience when she invites an artist to their “second place” to stay, paint and commune. After seeing his work, she recognizes what she believes to be not only talent, but an ability to really “see” things, and to get at the truth of them. The “second place” is in a beautiful marsh, and while many have tried to capture its beauty, none have been able to succeed. But really… it is show more M, herself, who is desperate to be seen. It’s a pandemic novel, sort of, but so much more.

I really related to M. There is a line in the book that goes, “Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him, but to myself, because as I’ve told you I’ve been criticized all my life: it’s how I’ve come to know that I’m there.” That really got me. I just stared at the words, a little lump forming in my throat. Small discoveries about my own perception in regards to motherhood, identity, womanhood and more came with every page. It was such a profound experience. I also appreciated the discussion on motherhood. It was nuanced and real, a portrayal of great love and also sacrifice, a shifting of being within a body, a life, and a complicated exchange. And yet the novel was never bogged down by those themes. They unfolded naturally and subtly.

I was continuously reading out lines to my partner, until he decided to listen to the audiobook. I would like to say that if you want to know ME a little better, this could do that (for better or worse, yikes!) I really loved it. Five stars. Totally recommend this one. show less