Rachel Cusk: Arlington Park

(Originally posted 24 May 2007.)

It is difficult to put one’s finger on how exactly Cusk 2006 differs from Cusk 1996, but the difference is even more palpable in Arlington Park than it was in The Lucky Ones. The new style has its pros and cons. Gone is the precision of the earlier prose; there is less wit, less playfulness in the language; there are fewer startling metaphors. (The ones there are often seem a little off, somehow – e.g. ‘a bouquet of tombstones’.) Her descriptive passages are still intense, but they have less power to surprise, somehow. In fact, the first section – about ‘Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life’ (quoted from the flap copy) – seemed rather clichéd and obvious. In my notes I have gone so far as to scribble, ‘waffle? sloppiness? surely I’m missing something – a writer of Cusk’s calibre must mean something with this???’

And she does. The novel begins with the progress of clouds over the prosperous suburb of Arlington Park and its environs. They always say one shouldn’t begin with a description of weather, but I loved this scene: the rain falls over houses and people and you instantly feel that this will be a rather ‘Woolfian’ novel – an impression that is strengthened throughout and especially by the climactic dinner-party, à la Mrs Dalloway. Everything and everybody are connected.

The precision may have been lost, but Cusk 2006 is about a much broader vision. On the level of ‘plot’, we have interconnected vignettes of the lives of various women in Arlington Park, on this rainy day. These women define themselves first and foremost as wives and mothers – or are forcibly defined as such, as Juliet would no doubt point out. There’s Amanda, who seeks a sense of stability and control in obsessive housework and interior decoration. There’s pregnant Solly, who seems to have lost her sense of self in motherhood:

It wasn’t that she and Martin needed money, in the sense of desperation. It was more that everything she, Solly, did, cost it; and once you started to think about it like that, you became sensitive. You saw yourself in a kind of freefall, uncontrolled, expanding and expanding into a great, expectant precariousness. Once Solly had felt powerful in her expansiveness, but now, pregnant for the fourth time, she felt aerated, overblown, while Martin seemed correspondingly to harden into a lean, vertical masculinity.

There’s Maisie, who feels guilty about this lifestyle of endless consumption (the following being my favourite passage in the book):

She felt she could have supported this nothingness, could have borne it and swallowed its dark information, if only there were something else, something elsewhere: if there were snow on Mount Kilimanjaro, for instance, she could have claimed her portion of insignificance and gone quietly in the knowledge that a righteous world of nature, of truth, survived her own incompetence.

But she was not insignificant: nobody was any more. And to fail at life when there was nothing beyond your living of it, no intransigent reality to revolve on and on in its mysterious justice! When flowers bloomed crazily in mid-winter and lakes dried up and icebergs melted, when forests died and living creatures were poisoned, made chemically hermaphrodite, when the whole well of life was poisoned, tainted, stained -

And Christine, one of those people who refuse point-blank to feel guilty, who think they have earned the right not to care simply by being wealthy. Obnoxious but also strangely charming, she personifies the spirit of Arlington Park:

It was this sense of order that allowed life in Arlington Park to be what it was. You had to have the professors and the politicians, the clever and the rich; and equally, she supposed, you had to have the starving millions, God help them. You had to have the top and the bottom for the middle to become possible.

The writing won’t please everyone, I’m sure. A lot of the time Cusk seems to be spelling out the obvious, but that, I think, is pretty much the point. Hers is a comprehensive portrait of ordinary, affluent, middle-class life. If her earlier novels were startling, Arlington Park deals mostly with the familiar; the effect creeps up on you, and ultimately the ordinary is revealed in its ordinariness to be quite extraordinary. At the risk of making this review much too long, I must give special attention to the natural rhythm – and ‘ordinariness’ – of the dialogue and inner monologues:

‘The thing is,’ [Christine] said, ‘we’re all so different, aren’t we? You’ve just got to steer your own course. That’s all you can do really, is steer your own course through it and not think too much.’

‘That’s right,’ said Maggie.

‘Because it’s hard sometimes, to see all these differences as positive. Sometimes you can look at it all and think, you know, what’s it all about? Where’s the logic behind it?’

‘That’s right,’ said Maggie.

‘You can start to see the world as a terrible place.’

‘That’s right.’

Christine emptied the remains of the bottle into her glass.

‘Speaking of which,’ she said. ‘Has there been any news about that girl? The one who went missing in the park.’

Maggie winced and closed her eyes. ‘They found her,’ she said.

‘Did they?’

Maggie opened her eyes again and there were the blue meadow flowers.

‘They found her in a field a few miles away from where she was taken. She was dead.’

‘Was she?’ Christine considered it, her glass at her lips, and then swiftly downed the contents. ‘Oh well.’

Final verdict: Very interesting, but uneven. Much of the book left me frustrated but now I’d love to read it again, knowing what to expect.

Faber & Faber  2006  256 pp.  hardback  ISBN: 0571228488