“I would like you to come here, to see what it looks like through your eyes,” M writes to L, describing the “conundrum” of the landscape to him. The story is this: M, a writer who lives with her second husband, Tony, on a remote piece of property, invites L, a famous younger painter whose work she admires, to come and stay in their “second place,” a cabin that’s an artist’s retreat of sorts, one they often lend out. This novel pushes its needles into the red. I filled the margins with check marks of admiration, but also with exclamation points. She digs into the gothic core of family and romantic entanglements. It’s as if Cusk has been reading Joyce Carol Oates’s best novels. More notably, this book has a swirling hothouse quality that’s new.
Unlike the Outline novels, “Second Place” tells a single story and takes place in one household it’s about a limited set of characters. The themes are similar, too: art, literature, travel, fate, houses, physical beauty and its perceived fading, and parenthood, described here as “the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny.”īut much is different. The narrator is familiar: a sharply observant writer in middle age.
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