Second Place

Second Place by Rachel Cusk (2021) What an odd book, and one of my favorites in the last few years, which is impressive because I had read about a third, wasn’t really connecting, so I put it aside for a year. Once I got back into it, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s got a deceptively slight appearance, not real long, kind of unassuming in presentation—but it turns out to be surprisingly heavy-duty, dense—it’s about everything, and it’s intense. It starts out with the first-person narrator addressing someone named “Jeffers”—odd, since that’s my name! Just kidding. My brother is named Jeff, but don’t call him Jeffers, even affectionately. I’m not sure it’s ever explained, maybe I missed it, but it feels like the reader is intercepting this personal correspondence from a woman known only as “M.” She is obsessed with a painter named “L”—and her explanation of how his paintings affected her is kind of breathtaking. She coerces him to come and stay with her and her husband, Tony, as they have a guest house (the “second place”). They live at a fairly remote marsh, on the coast of England—a place I can’t even really picture, as good as the descriptions are. Also, living there are her daughter and her boyfriend—and the young woman L brings along—so this remote spot becomes weirdly overpopulated! There’s almost nothing I relate to—marriage, kids, the landscape—no diners! And the ways days are spent. Maybe only the obsession—I get that. But as the book went along, I was increasingly drawn in and related to everything in it—so much so that I started marking sections with post-it notes—something I never do. I may or may not go back to them—it makes more sense to me to read the whole book over, at some point. By the end, I felt like I’d been in the shoes of all these characters—not just their anxieties, but in deep ways I can’t put into words—that’s what the book does.

5.2.26