From the Bookshelf of The Roundtable…

Second Place

Rachel Cusk

Start date: May 1, 2025

Finish date: June 15, 2025

Discussion: 2025 Tournament

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Round E - 1 August - 15 September - Reservoir 13 vs Klara and the Sun vs Headshot
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What Members Thought

May 05, 2021 Lark Benobi rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2021

I've come to the end to this novel with a new sense of how language on a page can sometimes be so vivid and captivating that it feels like a lived experience. Cusk writes in a voice here that's formally beautiful and mysteriously antiquated, and tonally perfect for the story. Each sentence feels revelatory--there is so much evidence that each sentence has been carefully, precisely written. And yet the language never feels bogged down with its own importance--it soars.

A lot of things happen in t ...more

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Jun 03, 2021 Henk rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021! - https://thebookerprizes.com/fiction/2021

Beautiful prose about a woman not really living her life, being in a seemingly perpetual second place
The truth was that I questioned the value of my love - I wasn’t sure how much benefit it could be to anybody.

Who is the devil at the start in the train and what happens there in Second Place? Sometimes I felt dropped into the middle of a rather opaque, if short tale about a slightly older woman (at least that was the Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021! - https://thebookerprizes.com/fiction/2021

Beautiful prose about a woman not really living her life, being in a seemingly perpetual second place
The truth was that I questioned the value of my love - I wasn’t sure how much benefit it could be to anybody.

Who is the devil at the start in the train and what happens there in Second Place? Sometimes I felt dropped into the middle of a rather opaque, if short tale about a slightly older woman (at least that was the vibe I got from the usage of explanation marks) narrating a visit of an artist to her home in an isolated march.
Not much real life details are given, despite some allusions to a world wide event (aka the pandemic) making travel harder. Still many real issues, including misogyny, dependency, regret and entitlement take an important role in this book.

The narrator has a daughter with a peculiar son-in-law, and an overbearing husband Tony who she seems to have overly submissive, deferrent feelings toward.
The rudeness towards the main character and her lack of self-confidence is woven in slowly, but quite brutally by Rachel Cusk, up until the point that she ponders that she doesn’t want her husband to take a dog since he might love it more than her.

It's a quite sad tale overall, including a rather deux ex machina event in respect to her guest. However if I don't sound enthusiastic, that's not entirely reflective of the reading experience (which I'd place at around 3.5 stars). The language usage of Cusk is brilliant and she is acutely observant.
I've ordered Outline and look forward to see more of her language pyrotechnics!

Quotes:
He doesn’t comment and he doesn’t criticize and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people. Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him but to myself, because as I’ve told you I’ve been criticized all my life: it’s how I’ve come to know that I’m there.

Change is also a loss, and in a sense a parent cab lose a child every day, until you realize that you’d better stop predicting what they’re going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.

Being with him in a particular time and place was the very opposite of being with other people: it was as if everything had either already happened or was going to happen afterwards.

I wanted him to be more than he was, or to be myself somehow less than I was, and because I wanted those things my will was aroused - in any case, there was the feeling of some unknown lying between us that awoke a dangerous part of me, the part that felt it hadn’t truly lived.

It’s all so silly, he said softly, half to himself. You get tired of reality, and then you discover it’s already gotten tired of you. We should try to stay real, he said, smiling that awful smile again.

Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.

It almost felt like the less I had to worry about, the sadder I became.

Only tyrants want power for its own sake, and parenthood is the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny.

I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted. ...more

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May 16, 2025 Pamela rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-tbr

Undoubtedly clever and literary - based on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos which is an account of her meeting with DH Lawrence - this was a challenging read crammed with ideas on many topics. The narrator, M, becomes obsessed with a painter, L, and invites him to stay at her ‘second place’ - a cottage in the grounds of her home. Her expectations of sympathy between the two are disappointed, moreover L proves a dissonant and destructive presence in M’s domestic world.

This is a book where I ...more

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Apr 30, 2025 Irene rated it liked it

Drawn to a certain artist’s paintings, a middle aged woman is convinced that he holds the answers to her existential questions. Although the time they spend together is revelatory, it is not what she expected. This is a very well written novel. Despite that, I did not enjoy it. I find the self-absorbed angst of well-off characters in comfortable lives tedious reading.

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Jun 12, 2025 Erika rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction-general, fiction-feminist

I would have liked it better, had I not read the brief afterword noting a debt to “Lorenzo in Taos,” Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of D.H. Lawrence visiting her in Taos, and had I not followed the rabbit hole to an essay in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/books/under...) that elaborated on the connection. Cusk’s novel more than owes a debt to the Luhan memoir. Luhan was married to a Native American named Tony, she switched from shapeless dress to fitted dresses when Lawrence was there, he I would have liked it better, had I not read the brief afterword noting a debt to “Lorenzo in Taos,” Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of D.H. Lawrence visiting her in Taos, and had I not followed the rabbit hole to an essay in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/books/under...) that elaborated on the connection. Cusk’s novel more than owes a debt to the Luhan memoir. Luhan was married to a Native American named Tony, she switched from shapeless dress to fitted dresses when Lawrence was there, he vowed to destroy her, and on, and on; apparently entire dialogues were lifted from the memoir. Cusk acknowledges having this source material, so I’m not peeved about the derivation so much . . . But the book is odd, and mysterious, and thoughtful, in places, and I had thought this was Cusk’s art, and it had a single coherent planned meaning, and now I find myself wondering what to make of it all. I mean, I read the book trying to understand the messages and points that Cusk was making, and the creative choices she had made, and somehow knowing that in fact dialogue was taken from a memoir … well, did Cusk make these choices? Did she see the choices made and embrace them herself? Did they change, with her adoption? I’m unsettled a bit.

It was a tricky enough book without this complication. Cusk’s narrator writes some startlingly insightful lines about human nature, and especially about parenting young adults. (At least I think she does.. For all I know, these too came from Luhan’s memoir.). But I don’t really understand what she meant to do with the novel’s little digressions about the dissolving of the self, and how one sees one’s self, and how one’s self-sense interacts with one’s environment . . . It’s as if Cusk is trying to work through something, herself, and using this book to do it. Some sort of midlife malaise, perhaps. I’m not sure.

Perhaps it is a meditation on different types of male/female relationships. The only really solid one is the narrator and Tony, but it’s still a little odd, because he is made to be somewhat unfathomable, though rock solid. The rest are disasters, of the man’s making. The men are self-absorbed and misogynistic, either overtly or passively. Tony is not, but he is also - I think - not as fully engaged as he ought to be. Being solid and dependable does not make up for lack of true engagement.

Read it if . . .you already know you like Cusk’s writing, you want to read about a needy woman (literary) artist in a man’s world, you want a short read with some zingers about parenting adults and some evocative visual imagery, or you fancy living away from it all in a marsh with a taciturn and enormous Native American man. I got nothing else. It did not ring my bells. ...more

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