More Than a Feeling A character skeptic writes one who can’t stop explaining herself.
the narrator of Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Second Place, lives at the edge of a marsh, a place of apparent peace. She loves to watch the water moving in over the flat land, advancing stealthily in a silver sheet. People have been lost to the tide; those who live on this coast are lulled by its subtle rhythms. Boundaries melt and reform and melt again, each time with danger slightly closer—and we come to realize the narrator’s mental place of safety is dissolving too. Though there is an identifiable plot in Second Place (something not always true of Cusk’s work), the book is an atmospheric, a mood piece, a drug. Fight it, and it drags you down like undertow.
Cusk has written tidally before. Her Outline novels, a trilogy published between 2014 and 2018, are beautiful but relentless. Although the books all share the same narrator, a woman named Faye, they are mostly constructed from minor characters’ stories. On and on, people monologue at Faye—on planes, in workshops, at restaurants. This flood of detail and observation never reveals Faye’s personality. Instead, it nearly washes her away, saturating the reader’s brain beyond the