An impossible guest: Second Place, by Rachel Cusk, reviewed

A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that the work will collapse into some or other version of nonsense. If it doesn’t, though, it is precisely the elements that flirt with disaster that will likely make it both superficially distinctive and artistically substantial.

For the novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk, whose most recent creation, the ‘Outline’ trilogy, attempted a savage blending of the two forms, risk comes frequently in the form of sailing dangerously — and, for her admirers, thrillingly — close to the parodic. Second Place, which in bare-bones description tells of what happens if you invite an artist into your home, ‘owes a debt’ (the author’s words, in an afternote) to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos, an account of D.H. Lawrence’s stay at the artists’ colony that the author had established in New Mexico. Written in 1932, many years after the visit, it is a portrait not only of Lawrence, but of Luhan, and of their tricky relationship. Now, of course, Luhan is a footnote in literary history, the fate of so many patrons of the arts, and of so many women who formed attachments to Great Male Artists.

Cusk’s version of Mabel — ‘M’ — is not quite the wealthy dilettante, her artistic enthusiasm crudely masking sexual and social appetites, that the caricature of such women has often relied on. But she is a bit. She lives in a marshy, pastoral idyll with her second husband, Tony, a largely silent, reliable, intuitively supportive type, a dab hand at mending fences and growing veg. Aware that his wife needs occasional injections of artistic and intellectual life, he helps to create a ‘second place’, a whitewashed, wood-floored cabin with enormous windows that sits in a glade on their property, and to which creative types come sporadically to create.