With her Outline trilogy (Transit; Kudos), Rachel Cusk confirmed her status as a thoughtful, provocative novelist, one that appears even more secure with the publication of Second Place, a psychological novel that's a serious exploration of themes that include female identity and the meaning of art.
The titular location refers to a cottage the narrator, identified only as M, and her second husband, Tony, have built on reclaimed wasteland adjacent the isolated coastal marsh where they live. Her plan is to use the dwelling as a home for "the higher things... that I had come to care about one way or another in my life." To further that goal, M impetuously decides to extend an invitation to an artist named L, whose work, she says, "picked me up off the street and put me on the path to a different understanding of life." There's nothing casual about M's invitation. A writer whose own output has been modest, she's dogged by a lifelong identity crisis. After L initially accepts, and then rejects M's hospitality, he arrives with Brett, a much younger woman whose relationship to him is ambiguous.
Cusk meticulously charts the rising tension between L and M as the two come into a conflict that L seems to have sought from the beginning, and that involves a shocking amount of asymmetric psychological warfare. Cusk is a patient, elegant writer, in some respects like her creation M, who admits she needs to "get at the truth of a thing and dig and dig until it is dragged painfully to light." Second Place is the admirable product of that determination. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer