Rachel Cusk’s Second Place rewards patience, as reading it is to fully commit to the author’s way of thinking, writes Chris Bateman

Press through the crowds, scan the paintings, read the placard written in six languages and step around the fast-forwarding cloud of tourists. You are a blur in the corner of a thousand photographs – uneven, out of focus and forgotten immediately – grinning faces in the foreground, art faded behind. Finally, you reach an empty room, no tourists, nobody at all. The walls an absence, no paintings here, only bleach white walls. Now it pulls you in. You turn and your eyes snap on to it, like magnets clapping together. The painting you have been waiting to see all your life. The corner of your mind, the thought never spoken, all you are feeling right now and have felt before is locked into this frame. A shimmering, vibrating reflection, there for the world to see, but nobody does, until you look over your shoulder.

Imagine how this experience would make you feel. The sense that someone could, with paint, a brush and canvas, capture that which you felt only existed inside of you, a feeling that was exclusively yours alone? Rachel Cusk uses a (rather less terrifying) version of the above as a jumping off point for her latest novel, Second Place, which dives over the precipice to consider the notion of self and how art might be able to interpret it.

Credit: Siemon Scamell-Katz

The premise of Second Place sees Cusk’s narrator invite a once popular and now rather forgotten artist to spend time at her home, a coastal retreat lying at the edge of marshes with enigmatic views out to the sea. The artist, known to us only as L, has been asked to stay in the hope that his unique gaze can help our narrator better understand the landscape she inhabits both externally and internally. Through this desire, we delve into one of the central themes of the book, the question of how art can help us to answer questions about who we are and what we are doing here.

In setting out how to answer the above question, Second Place takes on a journey, in typical Cusk style, with our narrator as vehicle to explore the issue. The main character has a degree of self-obsession and narcissism that is ideal for this kind of analysis and as we get deeper, we find that for her, art – and Cusk’s own art is surely language – isn’t so much about revealing your true self, but more a life raft, a redemption that keeps you going. For Cusk language is: the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet… is eternal. It is a powerful notion and one that is rewarding to reach. Rewarding because it does take a sometimes frustrating passage of time and dialogue to reach any conclusions. Second Place can feel slow and there are times when you feel that you just want her to get to the point, but, as we have come to expect from Cusk, her language is so clinically perfect, with not one single word out of place and zero excess. Arriving at her conclusions is therefore never short of exhilarating.

Cusk understands space on the page better than any contemporary writer: how to fill it and more crucially, when to leave it empty. There are entire passages that can appear terse, seemingly lacking because you know other more garrulous writers would have stuffed them full. Here, what needs to be said is on the page, everything else has been trimmed. Her Outline trilogy took us into a world that was airtight, precise and ordered. Nothing existed in those novels, or was even imagined, without her knowledge and permission. The effect was stunning: sometimes dizzying, sometimes claustrophobic but always perfectly, exactly measured and efficient. Even what was left unsaid, between the words had been constructed with that detail. Readers who are expecting more of what they found in the trilogy may be a little disappointed although this is not to do with a lack of discipline in her writing here, more that there are bigger, deeper issues being examined, on brighter and wider landscapes which, as mentioned above, she is more than capable of filling in.

To read Second Place is to commit to Cusk’s way of thinking. The novel serves as a vehicle to explore huge questions about art, relationships and survival. In this short review, only a slice of this has been discussed and there is a whole lot more lurking beneath the surface. It rewards patience and a slow, considered approach to reading it. Like a walk in the beautiful coastal landscape Second Place inhabits, don’t read this in a hurry. Take the time to breathe it in, to consider what the landscape means to you and what the hell we are all doing here anyway.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk is published by Faber

Chris Bateman
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