In Cusk’s headline-grabbing latest, a writer invents the biography of a film star who sounds very like Natalie Portman. Set in the now standard late-Cusk sans serif typeface (no frivolous flourishes!), Life of M serves up observations on fame in a light fictional coating. The New York Times called it “rarefied, cosmopolitan, self-serious”.Sample line: “Everything I did or said in her company was false.
It was as if I was acting, while M came across as authentic and real.” A collection of stories about diverse characters who are linked by the influence of a newspaper columnist. They start weakly – Cusk struggles to embody a working-class female prisoner – but improve once she turns her caustic eye to ski trips and lawyers. The short form enables Cusk to show a narrative strength we don’t always see.Sample line: “Jane and Thomas were ironing out their lives in preparation for parenthood, starching and folding and putting away their youth, their excitement, their spontaneity.” After a cracking first line (“The house, like the party, was subsiding”), Cusk’s cheerfully comic debut tickles the reader throughout, as Agnes Day looks for love in contemporary London.
Published to acclaim (and a Whitbread award) when Cusk was 26, it has a young writer’s weakness for using elaborate locutions as a shortcut to comedy, but there’s energy on every page, and her phrasing is always perfect: Agnes’s friend Merlin has “a salary for which Elizabeth Bennet would have left Darcy’s dinner burning in the oven”.Sample line: “Like a mirror he gave back nothing but what was already there; smash it and he would be gone, leaving her with nothing but a rearranged face and a few years of bad luck.” Cusk’s sparky second novel is a romantic dramedy. Two Londoners – publishing temp Francine and posh Ralph – bond over a dried-out risotto “like a dish of planetary matter brought back by an alien”. Francine’s house moves frustrate her mother (“You’ve quite ruined my new address book, what with all the crossings-out”); then Ralph wants to move on too.
Inspired by DH Lawrence’s stay in New Mexico in the 1920s, Second Place is a curious novel, and it’s the weirdness that makes it interesting.Sample line: “I’ve been criticised all my life – it’s how I’ve come to know that I’m there.” Cusk’s memoir of “all that love and terror and strangeness” of becoming a mother. It’s a book of scorched-earth candour: Cusk acknowledges her own misery at the drudgery of early motherhood and curses the asininity of childcare books. It was of course controversial, not for its writing – few could fault that – but for daring to challenge a Pollyanna-ish portrayal of parenthood.
Cusk was unabashed: “This is not a childcare manual, ladies. In these pages you have to think for yourselves.”Sample line: “When I found myself pregnant again when Albertine was six months old I greeted my old cell with the cheerless acceptance of the convict intercepted at large.” This novel’s Joycean opening settles down to an exquisitely written social comedy. The story of five young mothers, it feels at times like a fictional extension of A Life’s Work: each resents the confinements of motherhood.
Perhaps this is what gives the novel its jaundiced eye; not just snobbish (“Mandy Clapp – it was the name on the badge of someone working at a supermarket checkout”) but misanthropic: everyone gets it. It made it seem that she wasn’t bright or gifted or exceptional at all. She was merely good at going to school.” This novel is a perfect amalgam of the qualities of early Cusk: funny, cynical, rigorous and linguistically precise.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
