Cusk-alike: Writing about Rachel Cusk in the London Review of Books
Posted by the Bookshop
Our Author of the Month for July is the British novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk. Cusk is the subject of seven reviews in the paper’s archive, a reflection of her status as one of the most discussed writers of the past twenty years. Here are some selections:
Why do I have to know what McDonald’s is?
Patricia Lockwood praised Cusk’s ability to convey a sense of unreality in her 2018 review of the Outline trilogy, an experimental set of ‘autobiographical fictions’:
Rachel Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life: that sometimes it is as sublime as Homer, a sail full of wind with the sun overhead, and sometimes it is like an Ikea where all the couples are fighting. ‘I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty,’ she writes in The Last Supper, ‘why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why our race should have fallen so totally out of sympathy with the earth.’ A line like this is both overwrought and what I think myself when I look at these scenes. Why must we live in these places? Why must these be our concerns? Why do I have to know what McDonald’s is? It is a dissociate age and she is a dissociate artist. She is like nothing so much as that high little YouTube child fresh from the dentist, strapped into a car going he knows not where, further and further from his own will. Where is real life to be found? Is this it?
Knitted Cathedral
Cusk’s books, with their intermixing of fiction, memoir and essayistic asides, are notoriously resistant to categorisation. But does it matter? In her review of Parade, Cusk’s latest book, from last year, Ange Mlinko found pleasure in its genre-busting:
Is Rachel Cusk’s new book a novel, a series of essays or a philosophical inquiry? Parade sends the coin spinning on its edge every time you flip it. It’s the most musical work she has written, a punctus contra punctum, made up of stories that invert themselves in a dialectical fashion, propelled by a set of antinomies: male and female, parents and children, hardness and softness, freedom and responsibility. In some ways it recalls the work of Milan Kundera (lightness and heaviness, slowness and speed, good immortality and bad immortality), but Cusk shuns his bonhomie, his playful puppetry. Despite what some might judge a stylistic hauteur, her world teems with personages and anecdotes, echoes and counterfactuals. As she pivots among points of view – framing debates theoretically through her characters, shuffling through opinions and biases – a motif emerges, building to a credo, a cri de coeur.
I was trying to find the edge
J. Robert Lennon’s 2021 review of Second Place, Cusk’s first novel after the Outline trilogy, made a case for Cusk as a comic writer:
Second Place bears a passing resemblance to The Country Life (1997), Cusk’s comic novel about an unforthcoming woman isolated on a remote estate with difficult people. That book contains perhaps the funniest line of dialogue I’ve ever read, a sudden, unprompted insult so crass and out of place that its victim lacks even the capacity to accept it’s been said, and so continues on her way as if nothing has happened. Cusk’s characters are often displaced, alone with the wrong people, blind to (or excessively wedded to) customs and conventions, and lacking in self-knowledge. Second Place seems to me Cusk’s most sophisticated and mature distillation of these elements; it’s not a comedy, but it employs many small mordantly comic effects that function like a jeweller’s steel blade, cleaving faceted gems out of rough stone. It represents a new mode of organising the fragments of perspective that the trilogy exploded: a deannihilated novel, and a very good one.
