Second Place
A Novel
-
-
4.0 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Booker Prize
On O, The Oprah Magazine’s list of 55 of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021
On a sun-soaked Parisian street, M, a mother on the brink of rebellion, wanders into a famous artist’s gallery show. The artist’s paintings speak—quite literally—to her, promising a liberation usually reserved for men. She returns to the coastal home she shares with her husband, but the unsettling impression of the art, and the evasive artist, remains. So she writes to him, inviting him to stay in their second place, a modest cottage salvaged from the land.
When historical catastrophe upends daily life, M’s daughter returns to the marsh, along with her prim, privileged boyfriend. The painter arrives too, accompanied by a lithe, cosmopolitan lover. As the couples become resigned to the perilous indoors, fissures form within the strange group. The painter’s quietly demonic presence wreaks havoc with M, plunging her into existential disarray. As secrets, alliances and private desires come to light, she is forced to choose between her deepest impulses: to comply or to rebel completely.
Like her acclaimed Outline trilogy, Rachel Cusk’s Second Place transcends its form. Inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir about the writer D. H. Lawrence’s fraught visit to her communal property, the novel hovers between past and present, Gothic and contemporary, fable and truth—and continues to haunt us long after we’ve looked away.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Rachel Cusk’s spare, thoughtful, and brilliantly enigmatic novel explores relationships, creativity, and privilege. The book’s mysterious narrator—we know her only as M—lives with her husband, Tony, in a small house on an isolated coastal marsh. She invites an artist called L, whose work she adores, to stay in their guesthouse, hoping his presence will fulfill and inspire her. But when L brings a lady friend and M’s adult daughter drops in with her boyfriend, the small property fills up with people—and a looming sense of tension and disappointment. Cult favourite Cusk, whose breathtaking Outline trilogy we’re still thinking about, uses M’s fraught first-person narration to reveal just how frustrating people can be. Melancholic, sophisticated, and occasionally as cringey as an episode of The Office, Second Place sweeps us up in a drama of human awkwardness. Even as it feels less and less likely that L’s presence will give M what she was looking for, we were rapt to see what truths she might uncover about herself instead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cusk's intelligent, sparkling return (after Kudos) centers on a woman in crisis. The narrator, M, is a writer living on an isolated coastal marsh with her second husband, Tony. They have built a guest cabin on their property, which they call the "second place." Through a mutual friend, M invites a painter, L, to stay in the cabin. L's art deeply affected M 15 years earlier when she was a young mother and was struck by the work's "freedom" and how it was "elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke." To her surprise, L accepts, before canceling. M's daughter, Justine, and her new boyfriend, Kurt, who reminds M of her first husband, move into the cabin just before L shows up with a gorgeous young woman named Brett. The characters enter an uneasy equilibrium on the marsh as allusions of a global financial disaster fill in the backdrop. L paints portraits of everyone except M—which devastates her. Cusk expertly handles the logistics of the crowded setting, building tension as the characters form unexpected, temporary alliances—Kurt and L, Brett and Justine—and M's isolation increases. There is the erudition of the author's Outline trilogy here, but with a tightly contained dramatic narrative. It's a novel that feels timeless, while dealing with ferocious modern questions.
Customer Reviews
Second Place
Cusk’s writing is so pregnant with meaning it takes longer to read as the meaning takes time to absorb. In reading her one is also reading oneself, comparing the insights of her characters’ against one’s own experience.
This novel is not as appealing as the outline trilogy but perhaps no less substantial. It repays the effort with insight and the pleasure of witnessing her deft writing.