An interesting, if not always successful, mediation on art, male privilege and creativity, Second Place is one of those books that’s hard to place: it’s a novel of ideas and it’s a little enigmatic in how it unfolds. It’s not completely successful, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.
Second Place is told as a long series of letters from M., a woman who lives out in the countryside, to Jeffers, who we never really meet. It follows one summer when M. invites her favourite painter, L., to stay at her property. See, M. has a second house - the second place of the title - where artists and writers stay in the summer for free and create. M, meanwhile, lives with her second husband Tony, and for this summer, her daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt.
Not a lot of plot happens in Second Place. There’s a prelude in Paris, where M. first sees L's art and is inspired by his paintings, then there’s some exchanges of letters, and finally L comes to visit after a couple of false starts. We learn a little backstory: M’s first marriage was a disaster for her, and left her hurt and vulnerable; Tony, a quiet, solitary guy with prematurely white hair and who works the land for a living, all but rescued her and brought her up north, out along the coast somewhere. Cusk leaves it vague, which means it could be anywhere - it strikes one as a metaphor for the opposite of the urban landscape, a place where people are left to their own devices.
As mentioned above, this is a novel of ideas, which means the plot is almost secondary. Throughout the book, Cusk sets M off against L, two people who see life in different, almost damaged ways, and uses them to explore ideas of creativity, privilege and the meaning of life. If this sounds like heady stuff, well, it is. One character is quoted as saying they want to destroy another. Why? No reason is given, at least none that advances the bare-bones plot. It’s just the way the one character operates. So let’s dive into them, shall we?
L is a painter of some renown. He’s been exhibited around the world and had some early success, although by the time M reaches out, he’s a little down on his luck. He’s getting older, his creativity is a little spent, and he’s trying to recapture a lost youth by palling around with Brett, a 30-something woman who’s independently wealthy and acts as L’s factotum. He arrives at second place hoping to capture some fire, or at least because he’s burned so many bridges, and he goes on burning them - by the end of his visit, there’s no doubt in the reader’s mind as to why this guy keeps on roaming from place to place.
M, meanwhile, is a solitary woman, one recovering from a bad marriage (the scenes with her first husband are harrowing, with Cusk deftly capturing an emotionally abusive and manipulative relationship) and who isn’t able to trust other people, except maybe Tony, but who puts a lot of stock in the healing power of art. Maybe that’s why she invites so many artists up to her place, but maybe she likes to think of herself as on the preiferary of power, a sort of muse-like figure. Cusk wisely doesn’t delve too deeply into this.
Where the book gets muddled is when M and L interact. They’re like two cats circling each other in an alley, each waiting for the other to pounce. It’s a toxic relationship, and they say things to each other in crisp, brusque sentences, the kind nobody says outside of maybe a Bergman film. For example:
“ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I know how to be a woman. I believe that no one ever showed me.’
‘It isn’t a question of showing,’ he said, ‘it’s a question of being permitted.’
‘You said when we first spoke you couldn’t see me,’ I said. ‘So maybe you’re the one who isn’t permitting.’
‘You always try to force things,’ he said. ‘It’s as if you think nothing would ever happen, unless you made it.’
‘I believe nothing would,’ I said.” (pg 106)
It isn’t so much that nobody talks like this, but that Cusk is using her characters to argue points of view, to debate in a way people do on a deeper level, to make the subtext into text. It’s not always successful, and sometimes it sounds canned, but it’s also interesting in it’s own way: nothing else I’ve read this year argues in quite the same way about these themes.
But at times, it made me think about Jeanne Thornton’s novel Summer Fun, which touches on a lot of the same ideas in a more successful way. In that novel, Thornton’s narrator Gala writes letters to a musician (B----), and spins a tale about gender roles, creativity in music and the inspiration comes out of real life. Thornton’s a little more successful because one gets the idea she’s lived with this music and knows it inside and out, in a way that one doesn’t get with Cusk and painting. The scenes where B---- sits at a piano and plays their heart out, pounding keys and stomping on pedals are moving and get to the heart of the matter; the scenes where L paints are there to push forward the idea that he’s heartless, or least doesn’t care about anyone but himself.
And I think that’s key to what makes Second Place an almost frustrating read at times: it seems the two mouthpieces here talk a lot about art and inspiration and what makes people tick, but it also seems like neither one especially gets too deep into any of those topics. They know how to charm and disarm, but when it gets to the nuts-and-bolts of it all, they’re mouthpieces without an instrument.
All in all, Second Place is not Cusk’s best work and seems likely to be relegated to a minor place in her bibliography; newcomers should start with the Outline trilogy or maybe her memoirs. And those who seek a deeper insight into art and what more pretentious critics might call “the human condition” can find better insights in other books published this year. It’s not a bad book by any means - Cuck’s prose is crisp and, admittedly, I never once thought about chucking this novel - but it’ll leave you wanting.