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“It is full of desolation and solace and mystery, and it hasn’t yet told its secret to anyone.” “I would like you to come here, to see what it looks like through your eyes,” M writes to L, describing the “conundrum” of the landscape to him. The story is this: M, a writer who lives with her second husband, Tony, on a remote piece of property, invites L, a famous younger painter whose work she admires, to come and stay in their “second place,” a cabin that’s an artist’s retreat of sorts, one they often lend out. This novel pushes its needles into the red. I filled the margins with check marks of admiration, but also with exclamation points. She digs into the gothic core of family and romantic entanglements.

It’s as if Cusk has been reading Joyce Carol Oates’s best novels.

More notably, this book has a swirling hothouse quality that’s new. Unlike the Outline novels, “Second Place” tells a single story and takes place in one household it’s about a limited set of characters. The themes are similar, too: art, literature, travel, fate, houses, physical beauty and its perceived fading, and parenthood, described here as “the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny.”īut much is different. At the end of her book, Luhan tells Jeffers he is “a clear channel,” and that she thinks, after Lawrence brought her “to the happy immolation that has in it no false desire,” she’s become “a clear one, now, too.” And Cusk has M, at the end of her own tale to Jeffers, write, “I hope I have become, or am becoming, a clear channel.The narrator is familiar: a sharply observant writer in middle age.

Luhan tells her story to the poet Robinson Jeffers, and Cusk does more than merely mimic Luhan’s style Luhan had a taciturn Native American husband named Tony, and M’s husband Tony is also taciturn and “dark-skinned.” When Lawrence arrived in New Mexico, Luhan wrote, “Tony is never any help at such a moment, and he just stood there.” And when L arrives at the marsh, Cusk writes, “Tony is never any help in that kind of situation - he just stands there and says nothing.” Cusk even echoes some of Luhan’s best lines. Lawrence, who she “willed” to her place in New Mexico. Yet in an endnote, she mentions her novel “owes a debt” to “ Lorenzo in Taos,” a 1932 memoir by art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, about her stormy time with D.H.

“Second Place” is written as a letter from M to a mysterious “Jeffers,” whose name pops up every page or two.