Second Place by Rachel Cusk

It's been quite a while since the publication of “Outline” which is the only other book by Rachel Cusk that I've read. I was enthusiastic to try her fiction again by reading “Second Place” since it has been listed for this year's Booker Prize, but now I remember why I've avoided her books. I'm not necessarily put off by the ponderous nature of her narratives or the rarified environments her fiction is set in. It's more the manner in which she writes about her characters which is entirely centred on the self, but avoids getting to the heart of their being. Her narrators seem so intent on intellectualizing their position in life and relationships with other people that I struggle to emotionally connect with their experiences or point of view. I understand this is a conscious choice and sometimes what is left unsaid says more than forthright confessions. But this stance is more troublesome than preventing me from connecting with her characters. It means I actually struggle to engage with the ideas and issues raised in the story because I don't understand the narrator's position.

This most recent novel is told from the point of view of a woman speaking to someone named Jeffers. Who Jeffers is or why she's giving him a detailed account of a particular time in her life is never specified, but it means she controls the entire narrative and the only information we have is through her subjective point of view. Can we trust her perspective? Even though she states “I am determined not to falsify anything, even for the sake of a narrative” we're often left wondering how much she's shaping this story based on what she chooses to recount and what is left out. We never even learn her name as she's just referred to as M. Her story concerns a period when she invited a famous artist (only referred to as L) to her coastal English home to temporarily reside in a small guest cottage on her property that she refers to as the second place. Given that the letter M comes after L we can already see the layered meaning of this novel's title.

At the beginning of the story she describes a disturbing experience where she was hounded by the devil while travelling in Paris, yet the circumstances surrounding this bizarre, haunting encounter remain vague. Though she welcomes the artist L to her home with the hope that their interactions will enhance her life they soon develop an antagonistic relationship and this leads her to characterise him as the devil as well. To believe oneself hounded by such a figure feels to me like an extreme case of paranoia. I started to wonder if L is someone that M has just invented to torment her. Every time they converse she becomes so defensive it's as if there's no way for him to interact with her where she won't take the stance of someone being persecuted: “he emanated a kind of physical neutrality that I took personally and interpreted as a sign that he did not consider me to be truly a woman.” L also brings with him a beautiful and wealthy younger woman named Brett who makes M feel inadequate. It's (probably intentionally) somewhat comical the way Brett so confidently inhabits being a woman and the fact that L is inspired to paint portraits of everyone except for M when really she's the one wanting to be immortalized in art. But this humour didn't have the sympathetic effect which self deprecation or insecurity usually inspire.

It seemed to me that the narrator must have been severely traumatized or wronged, but I could never clearly see in what way. She refers to a difficult first marriage, her struggle to know how to be a woman and feelings of self disgust, but these things are only lightly touched upon without showing their fully complexity. Her identity remains elusive as do other aspects of the story such as a crisis in society which complicates L travelling to their home (the financial crash? the pandemic?) and her career as a writer (are we meant to assume this is Cusk herself?) All this intentional vagueness meant the narrator's various dilemmas regarding her identity and the existential crisis of her existence didn't feel anchored to anything concrete so I found it difficult to empathise with her. She comes across as so self-centred and navel-gazing amidst her idleness “I often found myself with nothing to do. Nothing to do!” that it mostly felt like she was inventing drama in her life simply to distract herself from her boredom.

I was continuously frustrated by the way the narrator failed to consider any inner life other than her own: “Everybody else, it seemed to me, lived perfectly happily in themselves. Only I drifted around like a vagrant spirit, cast out of the home of myself to be buffeted by every word and mood and whim of other people.” It takes a real failure of imagination and lack of sympathy to imagine that everyone else is perfectly content inhabiting themselves. I'm not averse to a story about introspection by someone writing from a place of privilege or pondering the way abstract theories can hone our understanding of identity. In fact, the premise of an unnamed narrator speaking in detail about herself to a mysterious man strongly reminded me of the novel “The Appointment” by Katharina Volckmer. But, where Volckmer's novel succeeded in teasing out tantalizing ideas and complicated issues through such extended contemplation, Cusk's book feels like it's simply posturing and grasping for profundity.

Outline by Rachel Cusk

It’s unsettling and frustrating at first. Rachel Cusk’s novel “Outline” begins with a narrator (who remains nameless throughout most of the novel) taking a plane to Athens in order to teach a writing course. She strikes up a conversation with an older semi-wealthy man in the seat next to hers. Despite a long monologue where he divulges the most intimate details of his failed marriages, family strife and financial struggles, he is only referred to as her neighbour and continues being labelled as such throughout this novel even after several lunches and boat trips she takes with the man. The narrator also has a series of meetings with other teachers, writers and the students of her class where she prompts them to outline possible stories they could write. All the while personal details about the narrator remain largely unknown.

Why the aversion to giving her central characters names or filling in plot details about these characters’ lives in the present? Maybe it’s because the narrator senses that there is something inauthentic about this thing we call identity. When she plunges off a boat into the water she “felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean… it was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity.” So she is trying to lose herself. As fervently as she wishes to remain a mere sketch, the more ardently I wanted concrete details about her identity. We know she’s divorced and has estranged children. There are occasional flashes of personal memories like a beautiful description of being a child dozing in the back seat of her parents’ car while being driven home from the seaside. Larger issues in the narrator’s life remain unclear. She checks her phone as she’s tense about receiving approval on a loan, but we don’t know what it’s for exactly. The need for physical escape, money and anonymity are what she wants. The awareness of this is the tantalizing thing about her which will alternately frustrate and intrigue the reader throughout the experience of this novel.

Souvlaki is a recurring meal in the novel

There is a lot of pleasure to be had in this book. There is light and dark humour. For instance, in a scene where the narrator imagines falling off the boat driven by her neighbour she imagines becoming part of just another anecdote that he relates to his new neighbour on his next plane ride. She imagines him referring to the incident as “the full disaster” - the turn of phrase he uses to describe monumental tragedies in his life. The exchanges between her writing students are particularly funny and well observed. Potent symbols are scattered throughout the novel such as a photograph of a couple in a cafe outside the comfortable apartment she’s allowed to stay in while teaching. The couple are suspended in a pose of intimate conversation where a joke or anecdote is being shared and seems “terrifyingly real.” This couple suspended in a moment of exchange is repeated in different forms throughout many of the narrator’s experiences in the novel where people’s stories are told over drinks and meals of Greek food. The ceaseless, searching, self-justified speeches accumulate into a kind of yearning people have to give structure and meaning to their lives. Yet, once they’ve defined their personal histories into a certain shape they become frozen as in a photograph. 

I found myself highlighting many passages throughout the book as there are so many intriguing thoughts and clever observations to ponder. They range from thoughts about the writing process to the meaning of identity. “Outline” is predominantly a novel about ideas, but unlike Tom McCarthy’s recent “Satin Island” (which I somewhat harshly critiqued) I was mesmerized by it because of the way these thoughts are framed within the distinct identities of a revolving set of characters. The chorus of voices builds to a moving understanding of the tension between living one’s life in the moment and maintaining a frame around it like a constantly running narrative where you’re the protagonist in your own movie. The neighbour follows his passions through one disaster after another, steadily building the story of his life that he can relate to strangers he meets on airplanes. He remarks at one point that “I discovered that a life with no story was not, in the end, a life that I could live.” Yet this is the only kind of life that the narrator seems to want. She’s desperate to avoid the crisis the next teacher who comes to replace her in Athens experiences where a man made her into “a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.” Through an immolation of the self the narrator (eventually referred to as Faye) achieves a defiant freedom to define her life as she pleases. The outline of who she is cannot be filled in by the interpretation of any listener within the story or reader of this novel.