Second Place by Rachel Cusk

Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later. My difficulty, I saw then, had always lain in finding a way to give back all the impressions I had received, to render an account to a god who had never come and never come, despite my desire to surrender everything that was stored inside me. Yet even so my receptive faculty had not, for some reason, failed me: I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator, and I saw that I had summoned L across the continents intuitively believing that he could perform that transformative function for me, could release me into creative action. Well, he had obeyed, and apparently nothing significant had come of it, beyond the momentary flashes of insight between us that had been interspersed by so many hours of frustration and blankness and pain.

A woman, who identifies herself only as M, writers a letter to a friend about whom we only know their name, Jeffers. She wants to give an account of a time when she invited a famous artist, identified only as L, to the guest house at her home, which lies on the edge of a great marsh at a distance from civilization. It is this house she calls "the second place," as in the second place on the lot owned by her husband, Tony, but the meaning of the title also takes in her own impression of her place in the universe, subordinated to her family, without creative capacity, condemned to be one of the playgoers, rather than the actors, on the stage of life. She and Tony have offered the second place up to many writers and artists over the years, but none excites her as much as L, whose dark figurative work once seemed to speak to her with an almost supernatural voice.

L's arrival, as anyone might guess, fails to fulfill her expectations. He's alternately captivating and cruel, and he has brought along a young and uninvited girlfriend named Brett. He oversteps his bounds at the second place, almost colonizing it, painting over the walls with a tremendous mural and ripping out the curtains. He asks Tony to sit for him, as well as M's daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt, but not M, though what she longs for is to be seen through his eyes--or, perhaps more accurately, for him to see what she sees through his own eyes, to put the marsh and its environs on paper and thus provide for her that creative capacity she has always longed for by proxy. I wasn't half as interested in L's bad manners until I saw, by accident, the note at the back of the book that says it's based on the visit that D. H. Lawrence made to Mabel Dodge Luhan's house in Taos; once I knew it I could see just how someone as enigmatic and gifted as Lawrence might take over one's home by the right of vision. L refuses to paint her, but he does vow--as M hears through the grapevine--to destroy her.

I have read and enjoyed the first two books in Rachel Cusk's Outline series, which I enjoyed very much. Their intricate forays into the psychological and existential states of the protagonist fit quite neatly with their peripatetic style; because the novels seem to have nowhere particularly to go, there's nothing wrong with luxuriously filling up the space with such stuff. But in a more conventional novel--by which I mean Second Place is obviously concerned with a specific and time-bound moment and animated by a specific literary conflict--Cusk's style can seem like treading water. Quite frankly I found a lot of the complexities here a little obscure, when compared to Outline.

Still, at the heart of Second Place is a beguiling reflection on the relationship between identity and creation. "My suspicion," M writes, "was that the artist's soul -- or the part of his soul in which he is an artist -- has to be entirely amoral and free of personal bias." Art, as she describes it, is a kind of self-abnegation; perhaps this is why she believes that L will be able to put her being into his art when he can barely take care of himself. Perhaps she could never be an artist herself because her want to find herself is so strong. Or perhaps creativity is a paradox: it builds us up while at the same time destroying us. "I wanted to be destroyed," she says of L's scheming, but perhaps dreaming of the possibility that such destruction precedes the building-up of a better life and a better self.