D. W. White
Critical Essay
This essay is Chapter One from a forthcoming book on the novels of Rachel Cusk, The Revolution Comes From Within: Rachel Cusk & the Art of Narration, to be published in November 2026 by Indirect Books.
OPHELIA: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
—Hamlet
A little while before she has her vision, Lily Briscoe reminds herself that “One must hold the scene—so—in a vice and let nothing come in and spoil it.”1 This is the artist’s task, to follow the scene, as it emerges out of life, and hold on, through the tempest. Lily is the hero of To the Lighthouse specifically because she understands this imperative, and commits to it, more than anyone—more than Mr Ramsey, who is waylaid by his own neurotic egoism, and more than Mrs Ramsey, who is waylaid by death; indeed more than the insufferable Charles Tansely or the avuncular William Banks—and in this way she stands in for Woolf herself, who spent her life refusing to let outside life disrupt her vision; for as long as she could, at any rate. In this way, the Lily Briscoe Way, Rachel Cusk is Woolf’s great successor. There are other ways, too, ones that this book will explore in its consideration of Cusk’s stylistic and narrational approaches, but we can start with vision, and belief in it.
As a writer Cusk is consistently interested in scene, and in what we might think of as picture-making in the novel. Most of her books are mostly scene, is another way to put it, which sounds simple and common but is in fact difficult and rare. We humans imagine novels in scene, but we often write them in summary; this is why most books are not as satisfactory as one might like, and why so few of them leaving lasting impressions in our mind.2 So what do we mean by scene, as an engine of novelistic depth? Scene is, simply, fictive present action being related in real time, with immersive details and verisimilitude of rendering; we can contrast it with summary or exposition. Novels need some of both,3 but the ones that can manage to do all its necessary novel-work while staying mostly in-scene are the ones that feel life-like, as Woolf puts it in “Modern Fiction,” and tend to be the most effective in accomplishing all that business of expressing the human condition that we’d like art to do.
Scene has been with us for quite a while; in his forthcoming Tragedy, Oliver Taplin makes the case that Greek theatre developed as such when there came along a revolutionary technological breakthrough of scene; moving from story-telling (in epics such as The Iliad) to story-doing (or “enactment”), and thereby radically upscaling verisimilitude (31-4). This shift is with us today, in the novel: there remains a cosmopoietic force to scene making in a narrative, allowing it to generate purchase on an account of lived experiences.
In this chapter—the first one that you, Dear Reader, are encountering and the last one I am writing—I’d like to take our friend Lily along to consider the first five novels of Rachel Cusk’s career, in something of a Sunday afternoon touring drive, stopping where we’d like and getting home well before dark. There will be rather more extensive excursions to come; for now I am interested in providing the intrepid reader of this book some grounding in Cusk’s early work while establishing the critical situation—I mean, the specifics of our approach to criticism in the situation of this monograph; although the other sense works too—we will be carrying on into our discussion of her “mature” novels.4 If Cusk’s vision is primarily a scenic one; if her belief in the art form of the novel is emergent from a more narrow and thereby foundational belief in scene as the engine of the novel, it may be helpful to witness some of this scene-work in her first few novelistic efforts, before undertaking the project of making sense of her overall achievements as a literary artist across her career.
*
As a debut, Saving Agnes did rather well; it won the Whitbread First Novel Award, for one. Today, though, it’s not much thought about—Cusk’s career has moved so far beyond her early books (the thinking goes) that there’s no real need to focus on them, in light of Outline or Parade or Life of M. In some ways this is true; Cusk’s approach to and interest in narration—and more broadly, form—has changed quite a bit. Part of the project of this book is to trace that development, or at least witness it, as we interrogate form and narration in her oeuvre writ large.
But like everything this can be overstated, and we can see later Cusk lurking behind the arras hung up by early Cusk.5 Saving Agnes, as a third person novel, does not have the depth and range of narration as found in, say, Arlington Park (Cusk’s most recent, and best, work in third). There is, however, an idiosyncratic voice on display—the type of idiomatic heterodiegetic narration that makes it feel like “someone” is telling the story, although of course it is definitionally not a someone but a something—that anticipates her later voyages into free-indirect style while giving the novel a humor that her “more mature” work does indeed lack:
So Merlin went unscarred, if uninitiated, through the three difficult years of weaning from adolescence; he frolicked untrammelled in Elysian groves of quantum mechanics and chaos, while Nina and Agnes dealt with the hard realities of English literature. They listened patiently, their hands dusty with medieval prose, their foreheads smudged with nineteenth-century hardship, while Merlin spoke sweetly of the frothy surface of time and the vexing disappearance of Schrödinger’s cat. It was not, then, without some surprise – and perhaps the smallest quantity of resentment – that as they emerged some years later into the harsh light and noise of a brutal London and anxiously watched Merlin take his first faltering steps, they clearly saw him break into a confident run straight into the arms of a multi-million-pound financial institution, a company car, and a salary for which Elizabeth Bennet would have left Darcy’s dinner burning in the oven. (6)
This is early in the novel, where we’re still meeting titular Agnes and her two university-best-friends-turned-housemates. The Austenian influence is all over this passage even before it’s made explicit; a directness which then gives it a playful self-awareness that distinguishes the depth of thinking in a book that otherwise appears accomplished if rather unremarkable. In other words it is a novel aware of itself as a novel; even in this most “plot-driven” of her books, Cusk—consciously or otherwise6—foregrounds the craft of her work; emphasizes the narration over the narrative. The invocation of Elizabeth and Darcy is simply the visible part of the iceberg, to malaprop Hemingway: it is the way in which the passage sounds like Pride and Prejudice, via invoking an updated and slightly sardonic interpretation of Austen’s free-indirect style, that makes the overt reference sing.
Agnes Day is young, emerging into the pseudo-adult world of first jobs and first loves; her considerable intelligence lays in folds around her like an overlarge jacket, too robust yet for her needs and uses. Most of her time in the novel is spent trying to discern the mores of romantic relationships, as if she were studying abstract art on an empty stomach. Her neuroticism is the book’s main interest: the fact of it, narrationally, and the consequences of it, narratively:
Making coffee, Anges grew increasingly troubled. The mysteries of social intercourse had never seemed to elude her so completely. Beside Greta’s chance meetings, her own encounters seemed both laboured and conservative. Did not everyone ponder, observe and ruminate before electing a mate? Or perhaps she was blind to it; perhaps the world around her crackled with fusion and fission, while she blundered with every step through electric fields of sexual activity, secret currents of attraction! How else had they come about, the infinite pairings on which the world had depended through all its ages? Had it been left to her, she thought glumly, Adam and Eve would even now remain absorbed in the round of art galleries and cinema trips which her romantic protocol judged the fit testing ground for love. (68)
A few pages later comes the novel’s thesis: “She found it hard to renounce her faith” (the gossipy narrating entity tells us), “however unfounded, in the ultimate, inexorable improvement of things” (74). That the book can turn and look at its protagonist in this way—an updated, in-the-know version of a Victorian novelistic staple—is part of its humor. This element, specifically as a feature of that idiomatic voice, is the principle manner by which the novel causes the reader to sympathize with its heroine; we feel for Agnes, in her naivety, and want her to find her footing in that strange world of women and men. In this way, Saving Agnes generates formal energy cloaked in the soi-disant conventionnel garb of a young-love plot: it might look like the book is primarily interested in telling an abbreviated bildungsroman set in late 90s London, while in actuality it’s mostly concerned with working out how to bleed a perspective character’s (romance-obsessed, to be sure) consciousness into a wry and cynical third person narration. As Cusk’s career progresses, the louder plot elements in such a dynamic fall away, while the interrogation of form escalates in urgency.
*
If Agnes is rather credulous in her orientation to the world—if she believes in the Austenian marriage plot, authentically and meta-fictionally alike—her successor, Stella Benson, is rather not. Stella, the protagonist and narrator of Cusk’s third novel, A Country Life, is a figure of dense elliptically in the Humbert Humbert tradition; she talks to us nonstop and seems to tell us next to nothing.7 She begins her account—one of her removal from somewhere loosely proximate to London to the “country,” where she’ll spend her novel as a something of a low church approximation of an au pair—suitably in medas res, in fact in media epistula: she opens by reproducing a letter “from” Bounder, her family dog and preferred persona of Stella’s own father, an emotionally distant fellow living a long mile from his daughter’s freshly-abandoned urban flat. This passing glance at her familial relations is all Stella gives us by way of expository background; we’ll have to work it out the hard way, over time and text.
Stella’s first person voice, we’re trying to say, is highly idiosyncratic and—to duck around a dangerous term—unreliable. She has a bit of a Humbertian insouciance in her fast-and-loose account of the “facts” that make up her narrative, and sometimes comes right out and tells us what she’s not telling us:
To return to my clear-out [of the London flat], I disposed of Bounder’s correspondence with mingled grief and venom. A similarly sized bundle of letters from my mother — with whose contents, which bored me even at the time, I shall not now detain you — followed it; and so on, until all the messy spoils of the past, accumulated over such stretches of time, won in conflicts both arduous and joyful; the whole long, tiring campaign of my existence was parcelled up into three large bags and put downstairs for the proper authorities to dispose of. (9)
The lithe direct address epitomizes Stella’s relationship with the reader; the book is a clear, if subtle, Jane Eyre reimagining (“Reader, I married him.”). As an instance of homodiegetic narration, The Country Life is an obvious forerunner to the novels Cusk has written since she’s become “famous”: the Outline trilogy, Second Place, Parade, and Life of M. Stella’s admixture of reticence, playfulness, and perspicacity is a younger, less formidable but more lively iteration of Outline’s Faye; one can see the way in which (the character of) Stella “grows up to become” (that of) Faye.8 This isn’t really how novel-writing works, though (save for an actual series), and what we really mean is that we can detect some of the techniques and approaches to first-person narration that Cusk will become interested in later in her career, here in this earlier era. One thing that Cusk, the novelist, knows is that first-person is less conducive to “authenticity” of the fictive world than is third: first-person narration is harder to do well than is third—I mean, the simplest type of narration to do well is third person, and the most complex type is also third person; all first person narrational modes fall between these two poles—and thus first provides a reduced amount of reliable information about its protagonist than does third.9 This is not something that most writers understand, be it in MFA workshops or NYT bestseller lists. C’est a dire, Cusk is very good at leveraging the first person to achieve certain and specific compositional goals in her novels, and The Country Life is her first attempt at doing so.
Starring in her Jane Eyre send-up, Stella spends her time with us and in the country looking after Martin, the challenged son of an obliquely rich-and-aloof family in, well, the countryside. She has a little tutor’s cottage and gets into all sorts of mischief and compromising situations; again, The Country Life shares much with Saving Agnes in the essential reductivity of its plot, and the shade of early-twenties hijinks of its tone. The narration is interesting both because Stella is a more advanced character, intellectually and experientially, than Agnes, and because Cusk has a better grasp of her technique by this, third, novel. Stella, as bewildered as she at times appears to be by social nuance or life outside London, is a more shrewd operator than her predecessor, and this is in large part realized via the subtleties of her homodiegetic narration; one that keeps the reader from quite being able to determine who is in on who’s joke, between she and us:
I fully expected him to repeat my comment, in a voice which would ensure that not one of its nuances was left unmocked. This feeling was not altogether new to me: I find speech a precipitous and exposing business, and often perform it with palpable stage fright; a feeling which, I don’t doubt, has resulted over the years in the formality with which now I am unable to avoid expressing myself. (111)
Here Stella is having one of her habitual spats with Martin in the family’s “Elizabethan” rose garden; she understands him to mean the garden is from the 16th century, while he cuttingly corrects her to the effect that the name refers to a type of flower. The self-referentiality in the first person—the way, specifically, Stella hints at her own diction being rather Brontëian—ushers a passing metaleptic cloud over the novel’s sunny landscape, an example of the depth and complexity of Cusk’s narration. At one point in her cottage Stella, in a fit of sunstroke, discovers a book authored by someone with her own name, a bit of Borges-esque meta-fictionality that the novel leaves a touch unresolved, but hints at the subterranean compositional agitations at work.10
Where these tremors leave us, in terms of form, is perhaps a bit shy of seismicity vis-à-vis The Country Life—although simply as a novel, re “readability” (that’s a thing too!), it’s very funny and smart and enjoyable; it was my grad students’ collective favorite, I think, in our Cusk class at the Roosevelt University MFA Program. It’s not Outline or Parade—and one of my favorite things about any writer’s career is tracing the evolution of their work, and their own understanding of it; this is pointed in Cusk, as it is with Woolf—but those books are yet to come, historically and in these chapters. We can certainly take something of it with us.
*
Of Cusk’s “minor” books—the ones that don’t have their own chapter forthcoming—I find The Lucky Ones, her fourth, to be in some ways the most formally intriguing (probably second only to The Country Life, for the record). In one large way the book is an outlier in the Cuskian canon: it’s a story collection. It’s not often talked about as-such—to the extent it’s talked about at all—and indeed the publisher labels it as a “novel.”11 But it’s not a novel; it is a series of linked vignettes that feature recurring characters navigating discrete fictive situations. While elsewhere in this book I mention “After Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Issac” as Cusk’s only true short story, that has more to do with the fact that the pieces in The Lucky Ones operate more fully within a shared context than as standalone pieces—but not a novelistic one. This taxonomical point is possibly irrelevant, and a bit subjective—I’ve even seen arguments that shade Arlington Park as a linked collection, which I can nearly understand, but I’d contend rather strongly that Arlington Park possesses a uniformity of gesture that makes it a novel in a way not found in The Lucky Ones.
In any event, the collection is rendered mostly in third person—only “The Sacrifices,” the third of the five stories (sorry, Harper, but ’tis true), is told in first—and features both classical Cusk thematics—motherhood, marriage, self-hood and identity, creation—within her typical, image-centric and scene-driven prose. An description of childbirth from the first piece, “Confinement”—which takes place in a prison, and is one of the more direct moments of socio-cultural commentary in all of Cusk’s work—is at once typical and singular:
Kirsty took the pain like a lash. There would be another, and another. It had the measured, deliberate cruelty of punishment. It was real, illicit, meaningful. She felt summoned from her anonymity. Suddenly she was full of fight. She hoped it would kill her. (23)
The imagery is what makes the scene, realized by a mostly impartial third person narration that is nonetheless clearly drawing upon Kirsty’s inner lived experience. This type of heterodiegetic narration—what I call “intermediate range third person”—we’ll have occasion to look at more closely later on; it’s the type of approach (with a few differences generated by an increased idiosyncrasy) that Cusk most fully realizes in The Bradshaw Variations and then especially Arlington Park. We both feel (for) Kirsty and see what’s happening to her in real time; an approach that maps onto the book’s overall goals of breadth of movement (across characters and story worlds) and exploration of the everyday.
I’ll indulge our scenic tour in a second example, this one in the first person, that takes its place in the robust lineage of Cuskian passages doing tremendous work on the issue of parenthood and familial life:
One day my lover asked me whether I would like to have a baby, and it was then that I awoke. I did not want to do that. I made contact with this certainty as a tired swimmer, reaching the shallows, finally makes contact with the ocean floor, and like that swimmer I rose up out of the water walking, quickly gaining the dry bank of the beach while the old life ran off me in numberless rivulets and evaporated in the air. (75)
Again it is the metaphor that transforms the moment into something much more expressive of the character’s situation; the way that creative writing manages to do the art-work of human connection. We’ll look at figurative language again, particularly in Chapter Eight, and the ways in which it interacts with the type of deep characterization with which Cusk concerns herself.
The Lucky Ones surely deserves more time spent on it than it’s getting here; the ways Cusk manages to move the narrative-level involvements of the characters across their rather loosely linked accounts resonates with contemporary conversations about the boundaries of the novel-vs-story collection, and what we mean by “a single artistic gesture.” On a formal, and more strictly narrational, level, much of what’s happening in the book is best seen as ongoing—and still developing—processes that emerge more completely in her middle and later periods. There is a way to see Cusk’s career as beginning with a series of projects that explore both narratively and narrationally—the types of stories she might tell, and how she might tell them—before moving to a longer stretch (since Arlington Park, this book argues) that has seen rather more investment into narrational evolution than narrative.
The Temporary is perhaps Cusk’s most “conventional” novel. It is, superficially anyway, a boy-meets-girl love story, one with a healthy dose of early Cuskian wit and cynicism (in her second book, between Saving Agnes and A Country Life). The narration splits between his and hers, as it were; both Ralph and Francine appear as perspective characters in a third person that relies on free-indirect style to orbit the two sides of a darkly comically doomed entanglement. As was the case with our previous stop, for reasons of economy I’ll let the minute discussions of this type of narration stand where they are later in the book. Both The Lucky Ones and The Temporary feature a third-person that makes extensive use of free-indirect; because we have three chapters devoted to the use of free-indirect across The Bradshaw Variations and Arlington Park, I’ll keep the discussion here relatively brief.
I’d like to point out a few moments in The Temporary, from both Francine’s and Ralph’s perspective (in effectively the same point-of-view12), that spotlight the way in which Cusk, from the beginning of her career, has relied on metaphor to do important character-work, especially around interiority. Much of the novel is concerned with identity and the boundaries thereof in relation to another; Francine and Ralph attempt to locate their own selves in the novel context of a “serious, adult relationship,” which neither are prepared to manage. This dynamic allows the book to make inroads to questions of meaning and identity that recur as late as Life of M, and even hint at some of the Wittgensteinian agitations that’ll be explored in Chapter Eight:
The physical intrusion which was often the price of her pleasures — a pay-off for the attention, infatuation, and supplication which preceded it — was a distant thing, a remittance calculated according to the principles of fair exchange. The scope of invasion was limited to areas of public access and in the privacy of her own thoughts, where she could wander freely amongst a range of other subjects, the trespass usually didn’t trouble her. She didn’t see why she should be expected to enjoy it, for the privilege was not hers but theirs. She had always felt herself to be most untouchable when being touched, and although of course she preferred the presence of a barrier between that suspect male flesh — who knew where it had been? — and her own, it was often an effort to remember in her detachment to insist on it. (149)
The big narrative kick in the novel is Francine’s (very much unplanned) pregnancy; as always, the questions of identity that Cusk asks are never too far from related ones about parenthood, usually motherhood, and The Temporary is a relatively rare moment in her oeuvre where the topic is explored at this earliest stage13. In this passage we see a hint of a “public and private language” discussion, which is probably my reading too much into it—Chapter Eight makes Wittgenstein the focus of Arlington Park—but regardless of the exact philosophy Cusk has in mind here, the notion of inner selfhood versus public persona is at the forefront. There’s also a strong current of commentary on the “attention ecology” here, as Jess Swoboda discusses vis-à-vis Outline, which she defines as “an environment that heightens alertness to and scrutiny of the networks within and among which humans exist, perceive, and interrelate” (373). For Francine, unlike Outline’s Faye, this ecology is based largely on sex appeal, even if her own interests are more intellectual than the physical manifestations she rather ambivalently accepts as their result.
Ralph, for his part, is happy to oblige—at least until the whole baby situation arises. “Being with Francine reminded him of films he had seen in which men were trapped with ticking bombs and were forced to defuse them by blind instinct alone. He knew he should feel sorry for her, of course — it was she, after all, who housed this horror,” he reflects, towards novel’s end (188). The Temporary is not super interested in upturning the apple cart around gendered stereotypes regarding sex in twenty-somethings, it is fair to say. Ultimately what keeps the book as something shy of Cusk’s best is this fairly limited characterization, of both protagonists. Ralph is not nearly as interesting as Cusk’s later male figures: even if they’re rarely given center stage, and often less than ideal partners, they have considerably more dynamism and range. Francine is not much better in this respect, and the novel ends on a dour, if amusingly cynical, note regarding the prospects of young love:
He felt all at once calm again. He wondered if she had actually lost her mind, but then realized that he was merely seeing more clearly into it: its accumulation of junk, its piles of magazines from whose covers trapped, vacant beauties stared, its reels of bad films, its numbing hours of television; all these broken, abandoned versions of reality strangling her soil, clogging her consciousness. She lived beneath a dictatorship of nonsense; she imitated that which itself was only an imitation, and try as he might to search for her in this hall of mirrors, he would find time and again only comical, distorted reflections of himself. The worst of it was that, despite everything, he saw she had been capable of dragging him down with her; for every soft, silly thing she threw at him concealed a sharp rock of implication, the fact that he himself had chosen her. (223)
Given this as the endgame for her second novel—Plato objecting to the imitational properties not of art, but of love—one might be surprised that Cusk spends the next fifteen or so continuing to explore marriage and domesticity. Of course it is her craft that evolves; the way in which she leverages narrational mode to make ever further inroads to this beguiling world of the home.
*
The most striking compositional element of In the Fold is that it is has a male protagonist, the only book Cusk has done (so far, at least) with a male perspective character.14 In the first person, In the Fold follows the narrator, Michael, in his navigation of the banalities of domestic life as they are gently threatened by the low tide of artistic impulse. Early in the novel, when Michael is taken to the mythical estate owned by the family of his university roommate Adam, where he drunkenly flirts with the birthday girl, Adam’s sister Caris, by interrogating her casting herself as a painter. “‘I was only questioning the idea that an artistic impulse could exist separately from what it wanted to express,’” he says to her, in the romantic moonlight. “‘Of course it can,’ she said. ‘An artist doesn’t emerge fully formed. He has to evolve.’” A few lines later, challenging Adam’s rebuttal, Caris says that his disputatious take on the manner is fueled by the fact that she’s a girl, and accuses him of wanting to “crush” her, before they kiss (21-2).
In my notes on this page, I have a question written to myself: who does Cusk agree with, in this play-fight between her characters? The answer is both, and in so being illustrates something of the formal importance the novel has within the scope of her career. The gendered experience of the artist—the capacity of women to be, and be seen as, artists—is paramount in Cusk’s thinking and work; Michael’s “take” on the situation, so to speak, is an interesting volte-face (if an early one) to her later work. In that respect, Caris’ point resonates; however, Michael’s insistence that the artist must create resonates with the themes and anxieties found in Parade and Life of M especially, as we’ll see in Chapters Four and Five.
When Michael marries, and the main action of the book moves to his adulthood, we meet his wife Rebecca, who locates many of these tensions around art and marriage / parenthood from, again, the “opposite side” of men:
When Hamish was two Rebecca was offered a part-time job at the [art] gallery [owned by her parents]. At first I was relieved by this development, since it represented, obliquely, a slackening of the hold the concept of ‘art’ had on her. For as long as I had known her Rebecca had claimed to be an artist, while never to my knowledge producing an item made by her own hand. A few times she got close to attempting it, a proximity which expressed itself in the immediate onset of illness and depression, accompanied by unexplained pains down the left side of her ribcage. I could not understand her insistence on giving a harbour to the tyrannical expectation that she create. (38-9)
It might seem, from these quotes and the general context around the book, that In the Fold is told by an antihero; boorish Michael undermining his wife and yearning for some retrograde male freedom. But the novel is much more interesting, and complicated, than that; there is a depth and feeling to Michael’s story—and account—that challenges the easy read, as it were. As a first person narrator he is not as slippery or (thereby) formally inventive as Stella (to say nothing of later such figures), hence the novel’s fairly brief treatment here, in a book about form. There is nonetheless quite a bit about In the Fold that provides important context for the novels we’ll turn to in the next chapter. It is also an interesting contemporary work with Cusk’s only true short story, “After Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Issac,” which similarly features a first person male narrator discussing his domestic situation as it encounters the fact of visual art, told in a brilliantly sharp reimagining of Caravaggio’s interpretation of the biblical story. As Alan (the figure of Adam in the story) puts it, discussing the central narrative element in which he encounters Renaissance painting with his young son:
I was seeing the writing on the wall with Sally: in my mind I think I was consciously separating myself and Ian from her. When I thought ‘ we’, it was me and Ian I was thinking about. And I worried about that thought, and when I looked at the pictures they told me not to worry, they told me everything was all right. They were sympathetic, if that doesn’t sound too silly.
Throughout Cusk’s work, art stands in for the divine: it is a system of belief that appears of its own volition in the secular world of the modern domestic life. What might be lost of the votive, in this exchange, is replaced by the tangible, the quotidian—in other words, the actual.
In the Fold, then, deals with the two great Cuskian themes: art and domesticity. Its investment in art and what it means to be an artist is not as pronounced or as sophisticated as Outline, Second Place, or Parade; its realization of the domestic is not as total as The Bradshaw Variations or Arlington Park. But again we see these themes emerge; we see the way narrational mode and novelistic form and utilized to accelerate central questions in the stuff of the book, as an art-object. If art ends as a belief system, it also begins as one; an understanding of itself as locating some new picture, some new detail in the human tableau. For Lily Briscoe it was a shadow that fell across the canvas, inviting the possibility of the human; for Cusk, that fundamentally scenic approach to craft gathers intensity as she moves into her “middle period,” becoming the defining compositional method to her career as an artist. To which we now turn.
- To the Lighthouse, 299. ↩︎
- It’s one reason, anyway. ↩︎
- There have been experiments with novels that are “all scene,” I suppose. This is off the top of my head (promise, I’m not going back to add to this later): Ducks, Newburyport; Les es lauriers sont coupés; Zone; Pilgrimage. In each of those, I could make a pretty strong case that summary works its way into scene (and/or that the novel’s overall effectiveness demonstrates why we need a bit of summary), but it’s arguable. Emily Hall’s The Longcut and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine are interesting cases of first-person novels that collapse their summary into scene, and are very effective in doing so. The one novel I can think of that actually might be authentically pure scene is Finnegans Wake, which seems to have no “zoomed out” frame of reference (has only one diegetic level, in slightly more elevated terms, borrowed from Genette); readers will probably have others. But in any event, and to stick with our highbrow argot, those four books I first mentioned are all pretty bonkers, and tend to make a point of themselves as being so. How good of novels they are is less clear. Although Zone is great, everyone should go read Zone. ↩︎
- There have been experiments with novels that are “all scene,” I suppose. This is off the top of my head (promise, I’m not going back to add to this later): Ducks, Newburyport; Les es lauriers sont coupés; Zone; Pilgrimage. In each of those, I could make a pretty strong case that summary works its way into scene (and/or that the novel’s overall effectiveness demonstrates why we need a bit of summary), but it’s arguable. Emily Hall’s The Longcut and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine are interesting cases of first-person novels that collapse their summary into scene, and are very effective in doing so. The one novel I can think of that actually might be authentically pure scene is Finnegans Wake, which seems to have no “zoomed out” frame of reference (has only one diegetic level, in slightly more elevated terms, borrowed from Genette); readers will probably have others. But in any event, and to stick with our highbrow argot, those four books I first mentioned are all pretty bonkers, and tend to make a point of themselves as being so. How good of novels they are is less clear. Although Zone is great, everyone should go read Zone. ↩︎
- This is another way in which Cusk’s career reminds me of Woolf, by the way; critical consensus has warmly drifted into agreement about Jacob’s Room being the first of Woolf’s “interesting” novels, blithely and wrongly consigning Night and Day to the same “conventionality” as The Voyage Out (which actually is pretty conventional). I see both writers as moving into an avant-garde space earlier than is typically contended. ↩︎
- It’s certainly conscious by now—now being Life of M—and has been for some time. I’m not sure how intentional it was in the early years; maybe Cusk herself doesn’t know. There’s a lot to be said for the importance of instincts in a writer. I suspect that it was simply how she wrote, and as she was able to establish her career she began to be more intentional in the areas she wanted to explore in her work. ↩︎
- I’m momentarily skipping Cusk’s second book, The Temporary, because Stella and Agnes seem to me to have more in common, and because there are no itineracy rules on our stately Sunday drive. ↩︎
- The more romantic among us might omit those parentheticals. ↩︎
- I want to expand on this, more as elaboration than qualification. First person is harder to do well than the more “basic” types of third; it is “easier” to do a relatively straightforward third person narration, and have it achieve a given level of competency, than it is to do so in first. However, third person can be much harder than first: something like Ulysses or To the Lighthouse is much more difficult to do well (I would argue, pointedly) than is say, Lolita (one of the more complex first-person novels around). In other words, third person has a wider range of difficulty—and possibility—than does first. It has a higher ceiling and a higher floor, to borrow from the wide world of sports.
My justification for this contention is, in some ways, the point and content of this book, so I’ll let the subsequent chapters have their say. Briefly, it is because first person is not an “honest account” of the narrator’s experiences, and cannot be, due to the fact of human bias and that first person is spoken, not thought (hence there is no such thing as “first person stream of consciousness,” which is definitionally nonsensical). Any reasonably competent third person usage of free-indirect style can get us much closer to the “true” goings on of a character’s inner life than that character could ever do by telling their own story. Good writers know this, and make use of that inherent bias to have all sorts of great fun in first person fiction.
Finally, because I can’t resist: this is also why first-person present tense is so silly; it undermines the rich complexities that are generated by a narrator’s retrospective lens, which itself heightens that useful bias (it’s also silly because it asks us to believe that the character is doing all these things while they’re also writing down a story, but I’ll leave my soapbox for now). ↩︎ - This is probably the most “meta” moment in Cusk’s career until Life of M. ↩︎
- Which to me is very strange; in fact it’s presented as a subtitle (The Lucky Ones: A Novel), and again, this is not a novel. In fact the stridency of the subtitle solidifies my conviction in its not-novel-ness. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. (The “lady” here being the publisher more than Cusk, by the way: I get an author having an idiosyncratic and even “wrong” view of her own work, and being a bit adamantine about it, but less so the publishing house.) ↩︎
- As I’ll repeat later on, in this book “perspective” means the worldview with which we’re aligned in a narrative and “point-of-view” indicates the technical method by which we see that worldview. ↩︎
- The issue of becoming pregnant—intentionally or otherwise—comes up in “Confinement” and “The Sacrifice,” as we quoted from The Lucky Ones, and retrospectively in Arlington Park, in Solly’s section (see Chapter Seven). Beyond that it’s quite rare; characters might mention it, but most of the focus is on mothers dealing with the ongoing fact of motherhood. Agnes and Stella are Cusk’s only prominent female characters whose narratives and lives don’t intersect in a meaningful way with motherhood, as they’re simply too young. We’re speaking of her fiction, of course; Cusk writes forcefully about the this topic in her memoir A Life’s Work. ↩︎
- There are male perspective characters in The Bradshaw Variations, The Temporary, and The Lucky Ones—as well as the story “After Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Issac”—but not as the sole protagonist of a full novel. ↩︎
References
Cusk, Rachel. “After Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Issac,” Granta Magazine, 2003.
——. In the Fold. London: Faber & Faber. 2005.
——. Saving Agnes. New York: Picador. 1993.
——. The Country Life. New York: Picador. 1997.
——. The Lucky Ones. New York: Harper Perennial. 2003.
——. The Temporary. London: Faber & Faber. 2013 [1995].
Taplin, Oliver. Tragedy: The Dawn of Drama in Ancient Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. 2027.
Swoboda, Jessica. “Rachel Cusk’s Attention Ecology,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 64 no. 3, 2023, pp. 373-398.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. 1955 [1927].
Dan White is the Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review and the Publisher of Indirect Books. He received his Ph.D. from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago and is currently a faculty member in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he teaches graduate seminars on the novel form and directs student theses. His first book of criticism, Rachel Cusk and The Art of Narration, will be published in November by Indirect Books. He lives once again in Long Beach, California.
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