Brett claims to have gone to medical school, sailed alone across the Atlantic, had a solo show of her photographs and danced in the London ballet, though not all at the same time, I think. Justine grows close to Brett, who is either uniquely accomplished or a truth-stretcher worthy of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. M loves her daughter but resents the way children force their parents to give up their places in the sun. Yet there is a fair amount of plot in “Second Place.” M’s 21-year-old daughter, Justine, is home with her boyfriend. One doesn’t come to a Cusk novel for plot but for her extra-fine psychological apparatus.

She wails that Brett’s arrival “changes everything.” She is furious that L wants to paint portraits of everyone but her. Her reaction to Brett is the reader’s first sign that M is close to the brink, mentally, and that this book will be a windswept affair. M did not expect L to bring a girlfriend, especially not a beautiful young one. I wanted to lie down and hammer my fists on the grass.”

After an early conversation with L, she writes, in language that is not untypical in this novel: “I would like to have burst into tears - such strange, violent impulses were coming over me, one after another. “It is full of desolation and solace and mystery, and it hasn’t yet told its secret to anyone.” “I would like you to come here, to see what it looks like through your eyes,” M writes to L, describing the “conundrum” of the landscape to him. The story is this: M, a writer who lives with her second husband, Tony, on a remote piece of property, invites L, a famous younger painter whose work she admires, to come and stay in their “second place,” a cabin that’s an artist’s retreat of sorts, one they often lend out. This novel pushes its needles into the red. I filled the margins with check marks of admiration, but also with exclamation points. She digs into the gothic core of family and romantic entanglements. It’s as if Cusk has been reading Joyce Carol Oates’s best novels. More notably, this book has a swirling hothouse quality that’s new. Unlike the Outline novels, “Second Place” tells a single story and takes place in one household it’s about a limited set of characters.

The themes are similar, too: art, literature, travel, fate, houses, physical beauty and its perceived fading, and parenthood, described here as “the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny.”īut much is different. The narrator is familiar: a sharply observant writer in middle age.

Second place cusk