Does art have a purpose other than occupying artists?

It feels as if Rachel Cusk continues to push the boundaries of what one can do in a contemporary novel. Best known for her Outline trilogy—Kudos, Transit, Outline—but as also the author of seven earlier novels and four books of nonfiction, including the wonderful essays in Coventry.

Her newest work is Second Place reminds me of an I-novel, one of the key literary movements in twentieth century Japan. As the name implies, it’s essentially autobiographical (semi-, if not totally), confessional and, in the genre’s later works, exposes the author’s dark side. Second Place reads like a confession, and some of the elements reflect what is publicly known about Cusk’s life. (But then, doesn’t every novel contain elements that reflect the author’s life?)

In a November 2018 interview in The New Yorker, Cusk said, “all of my thoughts about writing come through living—through observing how I live. Mainly, that’s because I am the person that I know myself to be, but also because I know how other people are living. In the end, my determination is to really get to the bottom of that in writing.”

The unnamed narrator in Second Place—she’s eventually identified as M (Mabel? Margaret? Mary?)—chronicles the book’s events for Jeffers. It’s not clear whether this is a letter; it is too polished to be a transcribed monologue. We learn little about Jeffers (he’s a novelist, a moralist), but the device is a way for Cusk to tell the story without addressing the reader directly. Rather we overhear M tell Jeffers the story.

M and her husband Tony live on a tidal marsh, “a place of great but subtle beauty” where twice a day “the sea rises over the marsh and fills its creeks and crevices.” They have built a second place (thus the title) on a parcel of wasteland that bordered their land “to prevent it from being misused,” which I assume means developed by someone else. They have been inviting artists and writers to stay in this second place as guests “sometimes for days and sometimes for months.” The summer is the best time.

Much the way Mabel Dudge Luhan invited D.H. Lawrence come stay with her in Taos, New Mexico, M invites L, a famous painter to come share their solitude, and after some backing and forthing, L eventually agrees. 

His acceptance means that M’s twenty-nine-year-old unemployed daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt have to move out of the second  place and into the main house, but better that than M and Tony share their digs with L. When L shows up, he is accompanied by Britt, a lovely young woman in her early thirties, that is, twenty years or more younger than L.

M had first seen L’s paintings years earlier when she was in a bad place after an ugly divorce, cut off from Justine, alone in Paris. The paintings had a powerful effect on her. “There is no particular reason, on the surface, why L’s work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman—but least of all, surely, a young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallized in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his painting emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke.”

M had hoped L would use the beauty of the local landscape, marsh and copse and sea, as inspiration for his art. After his early, prodigious success L’s recent work has not attracted critical praise or collector dollars. In fact, he is almost broke, living off the grudging charity of his few remaining friends and admirers. And he’s not interested in painting the local scenery.

In a relatively thin book—180 pages—Cusk is able to engage the reader thoroughly in the lives and relationships between M and Tony, M and Justine, Tony and Kurt, M and L, L and Britt, who apparently has joined L for the summer on the marsh on a whim. She is the daughter of a wealthy family that owns residences around the world; she can always stay in one in which her father is not living. 

While Second Place has a plot—an interesting plot no less—what makes Cusk’s writing appealing (to me at least) are her sentences and what they reveal about her intelligence. “I was naïve to expect that other people would merely allow me to change when those changes directly interfered with their own interests, and the revelation that my whole life, which appeared to be built on love and freedom of choice, was in fact a façade that concealed the most craven selfishness was deeply shocking to me.”

One more example: “For the first time, Jeffers, I considered the possibility that art—not just L’s art but the whole notion of art—might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction and our belief in the things of this world with the idea that there was something higher and better within us which could never be equalled by what was right in front of us.”

One of the conflicts (disagreements? differences?) between M and her husband is that Tony doesn’t believe in art; “he believed in people, their goodness and their badness, and he believed in nature.” It is this sort of throwaway speculation and discussion that makes Cusk’s books so solid. 

Readers who are interested in art, women’s lives, male privilege, and human relationships will thoroughly enjoy Second Place. As did I.