She wants him to paint her, so that at last she can believe that she truly exists, so that she can see herself and think I am here. What M wants, really, is to see herself through L’s eyes. She’s seen some of his paintings before, and she has found that when she looks at them, a phrase reverberates through her mind, a phrase she has trouble holding on to or believing in other circumstances: I am here. M invites L to stay at the second place with high hopes, telling him that she wants to see her beloved marsh through his eyes. So she has made a habit of inviting artists to come and stay in the little cottage she and Tony have fixed up on their land, their second place. All the same, she craves art, M explains, and outside eyes. She is never certain that she herself exists, but she is certain Tony does, so she can anchor himself to him. M sees the quietness and peace of her life with calm, unyielding Tony as an antidote to the terrible glittering outside world. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark “If you have always been criticized, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made,” Cusk writes, with devastating simplicity: “to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist.”

If she were 20 years younger, she’d have an anxiety diagnosis and an SSRI prescription. M has suffered enormous pain in her life - she writes obliquely of a withholding mother and a cruel first husband - and so she lives in a state of constant uncertainty, catastrophizing every tiny setback. M is a middle-aged writer who lives with her husband Tony on a marsh in rural France. And it deals with a woman we know only as M, who narrates, to us and to the unknown Jeffers, how she happened to bring the famous painter L to come and stay with her in 2020, as the pandemic spread.

“My version,” Cusk writes in a brief author’s note, “is intended as a tribute to her spirit.” Like Lorenzo in Taos, Second Place is addressed to a figure called Jeffers Luhan’s Jeffers was the poet Robinson Jeffers, while Cusk’s remains a mystery. Lawrence came to stay in her artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico. It is vexed and questing, in search of some missing piece, some object that will bring meaning to the world but is utterly inaccessible it fairly seethes with discontent.Ĭusk has patterned Second Place loosely after Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir by the artist’s patron Mabel Dodge Luhan about the time D.H. Rachel Cusk’s new novel Second Place - her first since the breakaway success of her Outline trilogy - is a lovely and vicious piece of work.

Second place by rachel cusk