I am exactly halfway through Rachel Cusk's Second Place, enjoying it for the most part. The story begins on a train with a nameless narrator telling a story to someone whom I first thought was her butler ("Jeffers") -- not only because of the person's name, but in the way she speaks to him(?), which, in the "nature" of British class relations, feels scripted (Jeffers's role, like the passive reader, and not unlike the Lacanian psychoanalyst, is to listen).
Sure enough, as the story moves along, the narrator's character modulates, broadens. In some instances I get a whiff of narcissism, at other times a self-reflexive, agency-seeking, slightly pathetic condescender eager to transcend(?) -- but more recently someone with a troubled past who is in the grips of a Baudelairian conundrum, never sure whether to act or remain silent, motionless.
Cusk includes a note in the back that alludes to D.H. Lawrence's stay at the home of a New Mexican arts patron as the inspiration for her book, and I see shades of Lawrence's Hester Grahame in Cusk's narrator. But instead of "more money," "there must be more" attention paid to her. In this instance by L, whom she has invited (sight unseen) to stay at the sprawling marsh ranch where she lives with her husband Tony. L is a painter who sounds a bit like Francis Bacon (at least early in his career), but whose landscapes the narrator has fallen for and have led her to believe that he might appreciate, or at least understand, in a way that might unite them, allow her to be at ease with her life?
As a reader who writes, I admire the way Cusk has set up her story, not just the details, but the decisions she makes about what to show and when. A very controlled form of writing, one that parallels the narrator's own need to control her situation -- in order to stay sane? But of course there's more to it than that, and the story at this point could go in any number of directions, which would no doubt upset the narrator ever further.
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