Second Place by Rachel Cusk review – exquisitely cruel home truths

The deeply gendered experience of freedom is cunningly exposed in a shocking interrogation of art, privilege and property

If you wanted to locate a defining preoccupation in the consistently remarkable, formally daring fiction of Rachel Cusk, you might well alight on the issue of property. Cusk is obsessed with houses. Her revelatory Outline trilogy, completed in 2018 with the publication of Kudos, faltered on the awkward class politics of its central volume, in which the narrator’s efforts to renovate an ex-council flat are undermined by the inconvenient working classes living below.

Now, in her first novel since the trilogy’s reimagining of novelistic form, Cusk gives us not just a dream home but a dream home with a second home attached – the “Second Place” of the novel’s title. And it’s not just any old place either. It is, says the narrator, “a place of great but subtle beauty, where artists often seem to find the will or the energy or just the opportunity to work”. Indeed, she says, “people often say this is one of the last places”.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3t4ofi5