(“I don’t think character exists anymore,” she told The New Yorker in 2018.) Faye rarely looks inward those books exude a kind of chilly spiritual equipoise. Instead, it nearly washes her away, saturating the reader’s brain beyond the possibility of absorbing more.Ĭusk has often seemed ambivalent about creating identities for her characters. This flood of detail and observation never reveals Faye’s personality. On and on, people monologue at Faye - on planes, in workshops, at restaurants. Although the books all share the same narrator, a woman named Faye, they are mostly constructed from minor characters’ stories. Her Outline novels, a trilogy published between 20, are beautiful but relentless. Fight it, and it drags you down like undertow.Ĭusk has written tidally before. Though there is an identifiable plot in Second Place (something not always true of Cusk’s work), the book is an atmospheric, a mood piece, a drug. Boundaries melt and reform and melt again, each time with danger slightly closer - and we come to realize the narrator’s mental place of safety is dissolving too. People have been lost to the tide those who live on this coast are lulled by its subtle rhythms. She loves to watch the water moving in over the flat land, advancing stealthily in a silver sheet. The narrator of Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Second Place, lives at the edge of a marsh, a place of apparent peace.
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