The artist she really wants to attract to the “second place” is “L,” whose paintings she stumbled upon a long time ago, before those “many changes” occurred. These she describes with Cuskian specificity, the “sweeping passages of color and light, the brewing of its distant storms, the great drifts of seabirds that float or settle over its pelt in white flecks, the sea that sometimes lies roaring at the very furthest line of the horizon in a boiling white foam and sometimes advances gleaming and silent until it has covered everything in a glassy sheet of water.” The laconic Tony doesn’t object, and the narrator “needed some degree of communication, however small, with the notions of art and with the people who abide by those notions.” She also wants to share her marsh with people who can appreciate its magnificent, mutable moods. The couple have built a cabin - the “second place” of the title - shielded from their house by a stand of trees, and invite artists to spend a season or so there. The narrator tends to allude to past events rather than explain them, presumably because Jeffers is expected to know a lot already. …” But the reader is never quite sure which fire smoldered and what changes occurred. …” “What is certain is that afterward many changes occurred. Could it be the poet Robinson Jeffers? But he died 59 years ago! Stories begin ominously, portentously: “It will take a moralist to understand how it was that one of the fires that started that day was allowed to keep on smoldering over the years. The novel, in fact, may be a letter (though it could also be a monologue), addressed to one Jeffers, whose identity is never revealed.

Exclamation marks abound, as if it were a letter from a garrulous aunt. “Second Place,” on the other hand, is elliptical and at times annoyingly vague and mystical. In her celebrated “ Outline” trilogy, three concatenations of digressive but exquisitely controlled narratives, and in her 2019 essay collection, “ Coventry,” the prose is analytical and precise, as if Cusk had internalized Isaac Babel’s definition of style: “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.” I can’t think of another way to say this: Rachel Cusk’s 11th novel, “Second Place,” is really weird.

Outline rachel cusk review