Novel of the week Second Place

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)

“Readers love to hate female characters for causing momentary discomfort,” said Hillary Kelly in the Los Angeles Times. Rachel Cusk is beyond worrying over such matters, though. Her first novel since her radical and brilliant Outline trilogy is narrated by a woman named M, who is needy, pushy, and resentful. It’s “straight vinegar”—“delicious and good for the gut.” M has invited a once celebrated painter to stay in a cottage on her property but becomes enraged by his behavior. Second Place feels like a transition novel, yet “Cusk’s open experimentation is refreshing, as is her belief that a writer must keep moving forward.” To M’s dismay, the artist brings along a young girlfriend, asserting a freedom that M can’t imagine exercising, said Helen Shaw in NYMag.com. The book remains “a mood piece, a drug,” a bracing bath in M’s fevered thinking. M is desperate to have L paint her, but L claims he can’t truly see her. It’s a crushing blow. Above all else, Second Place is “an exploration of how dangerous it is to want to see yourself reflected in the artist’s eye.”