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. 

What can a writing workshop do for you?

Because I was dazzled by Rachel Cusk's trilogy, Outline, Transit, Kudos, I bought her collection of essays Coventry. Although I wrote about the novels in this blog, Katy Waldman did a much better job in The New Yorker. She wrote they "represent an attempt to remake the novel, to establish a blueprint for a form of negative literature. Cusk believes that traditional fiction is broken; she seems to long for an alternative that is wholly unauthored, without artifice. In the service of that vision, she dispenses with every convention she can think of: plot, dialogue, interiority. Her recent books have a searching quality; they chase after radical realism, the authenticity of the ascetic who forswears all but the bones of life." Because these novels resemble nonfiction (no inciting incident, no plot, no interiority, no denouement), what are her essays like?

I'm not going to generalize. Each essay offers its own pleasures although one commonality is the terrific writing. "Driving as Metaphor" takes the reader on a ride through rural England. In "Coventry" Cusk's parents send her to Coventry which means that "Every so often, for offenses actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me." "Rudeness" talks about the implications of rude behavior with case histories. 

Cusk writes about other books and authors: Francois Sagan, Olivia Manning, Natalia Ginzberg, The Age of Innocence, The Rainbow, Never Let Me Go, and Eat, Pray, Love, which she eviscerates. Elizabeth Gilbert's voice is that of "twenty-first-century self-identity: subjective, autocratic, superstitious, knowing what it wants before it gets it, specifying even the unknown to which it purports to be abandoning itself. It is the voice moreover of the consumer, turning other realities into static and purchasable concepts ('tradition', 'the art of pleasure') that can be incorporated into the sense of self." Fun stuff.

For writers, however, her essay "How to Get There" is worth the price of the book. In the second paragraph Cusk asks, "What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer? Or rather, what is it about writing that makes other people think they know how to do it?" Composers don't have people say to them, "I heard a great tune the other day. Why don't you use it in a symphony?" Few people say upon retirement from the business world, "I've listened to a lot of music. I think I'll write an opera." Many people say, "I've got a book in me." (I know this because I'm one of them.)

The subject Cusk discusses in "How to Get There" is creative writing classes and the writers who teach them. She has taught creative writing and so brings an insider's perspective to the issue. "The ascent of creative writing courses has given writers a different kind of work to do," she writes, "and is transforming every established role—writer, reader, editor, critic—in the literary drama."

Because a creative writing workshop will contain students wildly diverse in ambition and ability and because they are led by writers of wildly diverse character ("contradictory advice can be given in two different classes about the same piece of work"), how to evaluate a workshop? How are standards defined? The answer she says is by agreement. "There is no autocratic way of assessing literature: the shared basis of language forbids it. Agreement is the flawed, frightening, but ultimately trustworthy process by which writing is and always has been judged."

She notes that some students may already be writers, "but often they are people whose immersion [in the social contract], conversely, has been complete; they are writers who have never actually written anything." But what is actually "taught" in a creative writing class? Point of view? Narrative arc? Theme? You can get all those in a good English class.

She quotes Karl Ove Knausgaard: "Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?" Ideally, what the student gets out of a writing workshop Cusk says, "is a feeling of being 'there' for a couple hours, the beginning of a process by which 'there'—writing—can become a more concrete aspect of identity." 

In other words, we attend a creative writing workshop and write, as I understand her essay, to become our authentic selves. This is not easy and the temptation "is to elude this labour by 'making things up', by escaping into faux realities or unrealities that are the unmediated projections of the subject self." Cusk says that this labor is what is—or, I would amend, should be—taught in creative writing classes. "How to Get There" is an essay for both writing students and their teachers. Cusk's collection of essays is for everyone interested in terrific writing.

Why Rachel Cusk's "Kudos" deserves kudos

Kudos is the third book in Rachel Cusk's trilogy. I've discussed the two earlier books, Outline and Transit. As in those novels, Kudos has no conventional plot as defined in my on-line dictionary as "the main events of a novel devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence." There is no rising action leading to a denouement. The narrator, a middle-aged British novelist, flies to an unnamed foreign city (it sounds like Dubrovnik to me but it could be Gdansk) to speak at a literary festival and people talk to her.

That's it.

Her seat mate on the plane tells her a story about the family dog. She meets her publisher at the conference hotel who talks about publishing. She meets another writer who tells her about a writing workshop she recently attended. She meets an interviewer. She is taken by a guide, a young man, to a party across the city who talks about college and his generation's attitudes. She meets a wealthy woman who offers her estate as a writing retreat. She meets another writer whose entire life has been changed by a smartwatch.

She describes the conference and quotes and evokes the writers at it. She meets with her local publisher's publicist who has set up interviews, one of whom who spends all the time available talking about himself. At the end of the book she has a phone conversation with one of her children back in London who has had a small crisis. She assures him everything will be all right.

And that's it.

But of course that's not it. The stories are interesting in themselves, in what they reveal (or don't) about the speaker, in what they say about the narrator and what she chooses to quote, and how they resonate, one against the other. Given that the narrator is a writer and the scene is a literary festival, there is more than a little about literature and the literary life. Her publisher, for example, has returned the company to solvency by jettisoning unprofitable literary novels and she asks about publishing.

"What all publishers were looking for, he went on—the holy grail as it were, of the modern literary scene—were those writers who performed well in the market while maintaining a connection to the values of literature; in other words, who wrote books that people could actually enjoy without feeling in the least demeaned by being seen reading them. He had managed to secure quite a collection of those writers, and apart from Sudoku and the popular thrillers [the firm's major revenue sources], they were chiefly responsible for the upswing in the company's fortunes."

Cusk would be worth studying not only for the way she handles dialogue but also for the apparent precision of her descriptions:

"She was a tiny, sinewy woman with a childlike body and a large, bony, sagacious face in which the big, heavy-lidded eyes had an almost reptilian patience, occasionally slowly blinking. She had attended my event this afternoon, she added, and had been struck as she often was the the inferiority of these occasion to the work that was their subject, which seemed to be circling with increasing aimlessness and never penetrated. We get to walk in the grounds, she said, but we never enter the building."

Kudos is not a long book, less than 55,000 words. But the words are so well chosen, the sentences so well constructed (look at the two samples above), and the thoughts expressed so interesting that it is worth reading repeatedly. As Ruth Franklin wrote in The Atlantic, "In her effort to expose the illusions of both fiction and life, [Cusk] may have discovered the most genuine way to write a novel today." I am not sure I would go that far, but Cusk is certainly original and exhilarating.

A wonderful novel in which nothing happens

This is what happens in Rachel Cusk's novel Transit: In the first chapter (they are not numbered) the narrator buys a dilapidated council flat in London. In the next chapter she meets Gerard a former lover and they talk. In the next chapter a builder visits to evaluate the flat's rehabilitation. In the next the narrator visits a beauty parlor to have her hair colored to cover the grey. In the next she participates in a one-night writer's conference at a rural college. In the next the narrator meets with one of her writing students. In the next, she and one of the builder's employees, an Albanian workman, go to pick up cement for the job on her flat. In the next, builders work on the flat and placate the downstairs neighbors who are as horrible as the troll under the bridge in the fairy tale. In the last chapter, the narrator drives to a Wiltshire village to attend a dinner party with her cousin and his new wife.

In other words, nothing happens.

There is no rising action; no climax, even within the chapters; no denouement. Events occur in the chapters, but not enough to call them linked short stories.

So why read it?

Because the writing, the observations, the intelligence are exceptional. Here's a description of the beauty salon in which the narrator is having her hair colored: "By now it was completely dark outside Inside the salon all the lights were on. There was music playing and the droning sound of passing traffic could be faintly heard from the street. There was a great bank of glass shelves against one wall where hair products stood for sale in pristine rows, and when a lorry passed too close outside it shuddered slightly and the jars and bottles rattled in their places. The room had become a dazzling chamber of reflecting surfaces while the world outside became opaque. Everywhere you looked, there was only the reflection of what was already there. Often I had walked past the salon in the dark and had glanced in through the windows. From the darkness of the street it was almost like a theater, with the characters moving around in the bright light of the stage."

It is not flashy writing, not sentences that call attention to themselves. But anyone who has been in a beauty salon or who has walked past a lighted shop in the dark can identify with this description.

Cusk is equally brilliant at describing people: "Amanda had a youthful appearance on which the patina of age was clumsily applied, as if, rather than growing older, she had merely been carelessly handled, like a crumpled photograph of a child. Her short, fleshy body seemed to exist in a state of constant animation through which an oceanic weariness could occasionally be glimpsed. Today the grey tint of fatigue lay just beneath her made-up skin: she glanced at me frequently, her face crinkled against the sun, as if looking for her own reflection."

Cusk has written three nonfiction memoirs and eight novels. Transit the "second book of a precise, short, yet epic cycle." The first was Outline, which I reviewed earlier. Cusk is taking ordinary events (see paragraph 1, above) and writing about them for what you or I would see them as—amazing, phenomenal, memorable if we had the insight to recognize and the art to record.

As a writer, I try to see how she does it. And I'm routinely struck by Cusk's observations about writing. Here she is at the writer's conference reporting another participants talk: "All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we're making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you want the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty."

Cusk neither debunks nor endorses Julian's point. She says she simply read one of her short stories as her contribution to the evening. She observes, she records, she makes art.

A breathtakingly original and unsettling novel

Rachel Cusk is a British author I'd never heard of until I began reading rave reviews her new novel, Transit, so I immediately picked up a copy of her novel Outline. Reportedly, Transit is the second novel in a trilogy; Outline is the first. They join Cusk's seven other works of fiction and three works of nonfiction. How have I managed to miss her all this time?

Because Outline is extraordinary. I'll go with Julie Myerson, writing in The Observer because I cannot improve on the sentiment: "This has to be one of the oddest, most breathtakingly original and unsettling novels I've read in a long time."

While I am skeptical that I can convey what makes the book so powerful (to start with, I cannot write as well as Cusk, nor can I think as deeply), let me say a little bit about it.

Outline is narrated by a writer who has been invited to teach a week-long workshop in Athens. She is divorced, has two young sons back in London. On the flight to Greece, she falls into conversation with her seatmate, a much older, much divorced man; in Greece she twice goes out on his boat with him; she leads her writing class; she spends an afternoon with a friend and a lesbian Greek writer; she talks the woman who is taking over the apartment in which she's been staying. That's it.

Cusk violates many of the "rules" of fiction. It is not clear what the narrator wants—and if we don't know what a character is trying to accomplish, how can we root for her? (If an author is as good as Cusk, we—or I—will follow her anywhere.) There is no story arc except that the narrator, whose name is used only once in the 249 pages, flies to Athens, spends a week there, and is about to return to London when the book ends. On the other hand, the book is full of stories; the people the narrator meets and her writing students tell her stories. Self-serving, sad, charming, off-putting and on-putting stories.

Meanwhile, the pages are studded with comments like this: "Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forgets one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of." Think about that for a few minutes and see where it takes you.

At the same time, Cusk is brilliant at description: "The woman who said this was of a glorious though eccentric appearance, somewhere in her fifties, with a demolished beauty she bore quite regally. The bones of her face were so impressively structured as to verge on the grotesque, an impression she had chosen to accentuate—in a way that struck me as distinctly and intentionally humorous—by surrounding her already enormous blue eyes in oceans of exotic blue and green shadow and then drawing, not carefully, around the lids with an even brighter blue; her sharp cheekbones wore slashes of pink blusher, and her mouth, which was unusually fleshy and pouting, was richly and inaccurately slathered in red lipstick."

One last quote and then I'll stop before I begin to flirt dangerously with the 'fair use' exception of the copyright law: "There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all." Something else to think on for a while.

As a writer, I am dazzled by Cusk's use of language. Consider what would happen to her second quote above if an idiot editor insisted—as idiot writing teachers have insisted—she excise all adverbs.

As a reader I waiting to immerse myself in Transit when my copy arrives. But start with Outline.