If she were 20 years younger, she’d have an anxiety diagnosis and an SSRI prescription. M has suffered enormous pain in her life - she writes obliquely of a withholding mother and a cruel first husband - and so she lives in a state of constant uncertainty, catastrophizing every tiny setback.

M is a middle-aged writer who lives with her husband Tony on a marsh in rural France.

And it deals with a woman we know only as M, who narrates, to us and to the unknown Jeffers, how she happened to bring the famous painter L to come and stay with her in 2020, as the pandemic spread. “My version,” Cusk writes in a brief author’s note, “is intended as a tribute to her spirit.” Like Lorenzo in Taos, Second Place is addressed to a figure called Jeffers Luhan’s Jeffers was the poet Robinson Jeffers, while Cusk’s remains a mystery. Lawrence came to stay in her artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico.

It is vexed and questing, in search of some missing piece, some object that will bring meaning to the world but is utterly inaccessible it fairly seethes with discontent.Ĭusk has patterned Second Place loosely after Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir by the artist’s patron Mabel Dodge Luhan about the time D.H. Rachel Cusk’s new novel Second Place - her first since the breakaway success of her Outline trilogy - is a lovely and vicious piece of work.

Second place rachel cusk summary