Community Reviews
The title refers to a second cottage/ holiday home on the narrator’s property, but also to her feelings about herself – she is never first in anyone’s affections and is supplanted by her daughter. She is referred to only by the initial M and she narrates her story to an unknown audience, Jeffers. She sees some paintings by an artist, known only as L, and something in his art (never explained) compels her to write to him and invite him to stay with her and her husband, Tony. The setting is important as it is on the marsh where lines blur in the mists, and a beached boat is a metaphor for going nowhere.
M’s daughter, Justine, arrives home with her partner, Kurt, due to the global effects of COVID, which are both practical and existential in their enforced isolation. Justine and Kurt were going to stay in the second place until L accepts the offer and arrives, with an unexpected plus one, Brett, an aggressively attractive and oblivious young woman who belittles M’s choices, and befriends and influences Justine. Meanwhile, L doesn’t wish to engage with M at all; he takes down her curtains and paints a provocative mural on her wall. When he expresses gratitude, M says she doesn’t want it, but she does like to control the creative types and is upset when they don’t conduct themselves as she would wish. L is also tyrannical, displaying the male artist’s sense of entitlement and privilege with a need to destroy that which he cannot control. We allow creative types an antisocial leeway that we wouldn’t normally afford everyday folk.
M craves attention and has an ambivalent attitude towards her child. She resents Brett’s influence over Justine, and yet she doesn’t acknowledge her as an adult or an equal. She obviously doesn’t enjoy motherhood and is bitter about the amount of attention children demand. M is unfulfilled and unhappy, and she looks to L to supply a missing spark. She says to Tony (in her heart; not out loud) “Is it wrong to want things that you can’t give me? Am I fooling myself into believing that it’s right for us to be together, just because it’s easier and nicer that way?” L definitely doesn’t give her what she wants and, in fact, tortures her by his brusque and insulting manner. M comes to consider that it is art itself which causes dissatisfaction by offering more perfect and unobtainable scenarios.
At the end of the novel, the author explains that it “owes a debt” to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir, Lorenzo in Taos, of the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in in Taos, New Mexico. This clarifies a few things, as the Guardian review explains: “The book doesn’t fully make sense without reading Luhan, and even then it’s a close thing. Yes, Luhan addressed her memoir to the poet Robinson Jeffers, but does that justify Cusk having M continually address a never-explained “Jeffers”? …Ultimately, there’s something excessive and undigested in the novel’s bid to recast Luhan’s thwarted longing for Lawrence’s recognition as a modern-day battle of wills between a sympathetically needy writer and standoffish painter.”
It is a very introspective novel, with minimal dialogue, which reads like an angsty self-obsessed diary unfit for publication. Many of the passages reek of melodramatic teenage angst, such as when M cries out, “Oh, why was living so painful, and why were we given these moments of health, if only to realise how burdened with pain we were the rest of the time?” The novel is full of empty aphorisms which seem deep on the surface, but don’t stand up to scrutiny. “The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it.” The text features a lot of exclamation marks, which suggest that the sentiments aren’t powerful enough to make their point on their own. The narrator is self-pitying and spends a lot of time navel-gazing. All of this relies on the surmise that we care about her, and unfortunately, I didn’t.
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