I’ve meant to read the British author Rachel Cusk for some time. She’s been praised by critics and awarded literary prizes throughout a writing career that has spanned twelve novels and several books of nonfiction.
She writes about women, in contrast to another author I recently discovered, David Szalay, who writes about men.
I probably should have started with Cusk’s acclaimed trilogy, Outline, or her most recent novel, Parade, but the one that caught my attention was Arlington Park, because I’m a sucker for novels of intertwined stories. Arlington Park takes place in a single day, chronicling the lives of five middle-class married women, all of them mothers of young children.
We have not just Desperate Housewives, we have Disparate Desperate Housewives.
What kept me reading is the powerful, deep, intellectual writing and Cusk’s ability to reveal the characters’ inner lives. What made me frustrated is that every one of the five women was unfulfilled, disillusioned, fed up with their kids, and disdainful of their husbands. Because they all shared a common wistful bitterness, they blended into a single, lumpy character overfocused on their own tiresome complaints.
As for plot, there isn’t much, which I don’t mind. The women drop off their kids at school, meet for coffee, go to the mall, and gather that night as one woman hosts the women and their husbands for a dinner party.
The kids, the husbands, what burdens they are:
“Her husband had left the house at eight, and her daughter Jessica was at school by nine; she had a feeling of rapid ascent, as though the members of her household were sandbags she was heaving one by one out of the basket of a hot-air balloon.”
Another quote:
“Eddie sounded concerned at the idea that his fate rested, even momentarily, on the precarious peaks of his mother’s mist-shrouded judgment. Anything could happen up there: it was a place of unpredictable danger and occasional savagery.”
Stellar, insightful writing. Impeccable use of metaphor.
One character tells her kid to shut up.
One is so lifeless that she feels like her husband has murdered her.
This novel is no picnic, no beach read. But it is imaginatively structured, concise, and explores the depths of women trapped within a comfortable but meaningless life and by the men who seem to hold power over them. They understood this is the life they chose, even if they were brought up to choose it, and if there’s one conclusion to draw at the end it’s that they’ll navigate the best they can the path they’re on.
Not my favorite, and surely not her best, because I’m still planning to read her Outline trilogy next.
