But the trio of artists here-Lawrence, Luhan, and Cusk-fold in on one another in unusual ways as Second Place develops.Ĭusk’s narrator, M, is a minor writer, on her second marriage, and the mother of an adult daughter the novel takes the form of letters from M to Jeffers. Cusk, too, has written about the ways outsiders unsettle marriages, and about how one person’s isolation complicates social interactions.

The novel’s setup is similar to one Lawrence often used: a cryptic figure sows discord in a small community. Lawrence’s visit to her ranch in New Mexico in 1922 in Cusk’s version, Lawrence is a famous portrait painter named L, and the story is set not in Taos but on the edge of a marsh, presumably in present-day England or Wales, though that, like much in the novel, remains deliberately opaque. These things all happen in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir Lorenzo in Taos (1932), on which Second Place is based, as the brief afterword explains. The novel has a conventional frame: an outsider enters a constricted space a woman looks outside her marriage for sustenance an artist destabilizes a family’s life. Which is why her new novel, Second Place, is so perplexing. There is a spare intensity to her prose that makes it seem written with a thin person’s pen: a control that implicitly criticizes sloppiness of body or mind. But her exacting mien makes me, as a reader, feel awkward: too large, too wrinkled, too eager to please.

This is not to say her work is mean or mean-spirited. She believes nerviness and irritation are necessary habits of mind to explore and put down on paper. Rachel Cusk illustration by Adrian Tomine

Second place rachel cusk