Second Place, by Rachel Cusk (FSG)

The urge to find something to liven up the home front is all too understandable these days. M, the narrator of Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, is a writer stuck at home in the English marshland and waiting out an unspecified catastrophe. Not so much a patron of the arts as an insinuator into them, M invites a famous painter to come and stay with her. L, the artist, shows up with a girlfriend whom he had failed to mention and little interest in taking inspiration from the company at hand. His aloofness leaves his host to grapple with her own bruised ego and the motivations that drove her to seek him out in the first place. As the novel’s endnote makes plain, the story is a reworking of the misadventure that took place when American heiress Mabel Dodge Luhan invited D. H. Lawrence to stay with her. In Cusk’s version, a tale of infatuation morphs into an anti–love story, a portrait of a woman forced to pull herself out from under weights of her own devising and set herself free, all the while stuck in place.—