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She loves to watch the water moving in over the flat land, advancing stealthily in a silver sheet.
Fight it, and it drags you down like undertow.
Cusk has written tidally before.
HerOutlinenovels, atrilogypublished between 2014 and 2018, are beautiful but relentless.
On and on, people monologue at Faye on planes, in workshops, at restaurants.
This flood of detail and observation never reveals Fayes personality.
Instead, it nearly washes her away, saturating the readers brain beyond the possibility of absorbing more.
Cusk has often seemed ambivalent about creating identities for her characters.
(I dont think character exists anymore, she toldTheNew Yorkerin 2018.)
Faye rarely looks inward; those books exude a kind of chilly spiritual equipoise.
The protagonist ofSecond Place,however, whom Cusk calls only M, isnt a sponge.
Instead of passivity, we get velocity; M flings herself desperately into her own drama.
(This echoes Dodges book, which includes her letters to the poet Robinson Jeffers.)
The first 16 pages are feverish: M, a young mother, is traveling alone in France.
There are mentions of a wretched marriage and her own self-loathing.
But for once I thought, let someone else do it!
And that is how we lose control over our own destinies.
The more M describes her inner landscape, the blurrier it becomes.
But she seems itchy and she is still yearning to meet L in person.
So she contacts him through a mutual acquaintance and invites him to stay in her guesthouse.
Soon, claustrophobia sets in.
Cusk keeps us oppressively close to Ms thinking, and her sentences grow hypnotic.
M is preoccupied by L, thinking incessantly about the painter who shies away from her admiration.
She is desperate to be part of his vision, overinterpreting everything.
Can he see her?
Sometimes he would look up and meet my eye, and something of his separation would become my own.
Second Placeis an exploration of how dangerous it is to want to see yourself reflected in the artists eye.
Spending nearly 200 pages in the company of Ms clammy intelligence can feel quietly horrifying.
Theres very little humor in here.
Cusk knows that her portrait of M and Ls stubbornness and stress-without-breaking can be a heavy read.
But for the most part, the novel is deliberately exhausting.
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