ne of the women in Rachel Cusk’s new novel confesses to an ability to shock that is “instinctive and unconscious”. This could double as a description of Cusk herself. To be controversial is second nature to her . And yet she continues to refuse to pull even a wisp of wool over her own – or anyone else’s – eyes.
Soon after this, another woman – Cusk has now switched to writing in the first person – relates: “One morning, walking along a quiet sunny street where people sat at pavement tables drinking coffee, I was attacked by a stranger who hit me forcibly in the head. My assailant was a woman, deranged by madness or addiction, and this fact of her gender caused difficulties both in the recounting of the event afterward and in my own response to it.
Throughout, she is interested in showing the ways in which we all – women most of all – are performing as ourselves, our homes our stages – and believes it possible that most of us continue to behave as if we were being observed even when on our own. She is interested in the pitfalls of performances and the risks of exposure and what arises most urgently is the yearning for invisibility, which she describes as the ideal state for an artist.
It is fascinating how by noting what it is Cusk dares to broach, one keeps identifying new taboos. About love’s complicated relationship to freedom: “Often we received the confusing impression that love disliked freedom and at the same time sought to impersonate it.
Towards the end of the novel, in the section that describes the mother’s death, the prose changes as the earlier “I” is replaced by “we”. It gathers momentum in what becomes an exalted and excruciating confessional testament, an exploration of pain, entrapment and loss. While Cusk’s painter concentrates on painting the world upside down, Cusk keeps turning it inside out.