Rachel Cusk

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	Photo: © © Adrian Clarke

Biography

Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles before finishing her education at a convent school in England. She read English at New College, Oxford, and has travelled extensively in Spain and Central America. Her first novel, Saving Agnes (1993), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), is a personal exploration of motherhood. In The Lucky Ones (2003), she uses a series of five narratives, loosely linked by the experience of parenthood, to write of life's transformations; of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand.

In 2003 Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her novel, Arlington Park (2006), was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest books are the memoir of a 3-month family stay in Italy, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009); and The Bradshaw Variations (2009), a novel.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Fiction, Non-fiction

Bibliography

Saving Agnes   Macmillan, 1993

The Temporary   Macmillan, 1995

The Country Life   Picador, 1997

A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother   Fourth Estate, 2001

The Lucky Ones   Fourth Estate, 2003

In the Fold   Faber and Faber, 2005

Arlington Park   Faber and Faber, 2006

The Bradshaw Variations   Faber and Faber, 2009

The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy   Faber and Faber, 2009

Read about books by Rachel Cusk at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Rachel Cusk at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1993   Whitbread First Novel Award   Saving Agnes

1997   Somerset Maugham Award   The Country Life

2003   Whitbread Novel Award   (shortlist)   The Lucky Ones

2007   Orange Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   Arlington Park

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Critical Perspective

Rachel Cusk’s work is notable for its dark subtle comedy, the creeping sense of menace below its surface, and its exquisitely sensitive treatment of the failure of expectation. In prose elegant and precise, but also lush and abundant, she probes those uneasy spaces between protective reticence and manufactured openness. She has an unflinching eye for the telling detail, and a fascination with the multiple pressures in human relationships. Strong on physical description, the evocation of place, and the oppressive minutiae of interiors, Cusk writing is also particularly memorable for its psychological acuity and emotional resonance. 
 
Saving Agnes (1993), her first novel, is the story of Agnes Day, a confused, sexually illiterate and socially awkward woman, bumbling around London, unsure of which career step to take next. Agnes is lost to self-absorption, and locked into a seemingly permanent state of querulous discontent. Even the most cursory of glances at the novel demonstrates the depth of Cusk’s confidence in her ability: the narrative is measured and controlled, and there is, of course, that unmistakeable style. Cusk is not interested in the extravagantly inventive language of a Self and eschews the polished simplicity of an Ishiguro. Instead her voice has a graceful formality, rare in modern fiction, which seems much closer to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton.

The Temporary (1995), Cusk’s second novel, is the tale of Francine Stock, a young woman working as a temp in London. Francine, like Agnes, is lost to herself, trapped within an unarticulated existential drift. There is something repulsive about her narcissism, yet she is an attractive presence. We are never quite sure if she is completely vacuous or merely engaged in a surreptitious attempt to become a master of romantic, sexual and office politics. Just how far she is complicit in her own unhappiness is a question which Cusk never answers, as we move to the increasingly dark final section of the novel. Anyone who works, has ever worked, or is thinking of working in an office would do well to read The Temporary. Cusk is extremely good on the sheer unremitting tedium of desk-bound life. She exposes the menial and the petty and mocks the ridiculous desire to appear unique which characterises the milieu within which Francine works: ‘every office was at pains to possess its own character: “What do you think of this place, then?” people would ask Francine at the end of the day, and although she never really thought anything, they would proudly tell her that she would get used to it in the end.’

The Country Life (1997), Cusk’s third novel, is one of the wittiest, most compelling and most intelligently written novels of recent years. There is also something wonderfully and ineffably odd about it. This ostensibly simple tale of Stella Benson, who gives up her old life in London to become an au pair in the country, succeeds by stealth. It is not just a fish-out-of-water tale, or a comedy of manners in the style of Cold Comfort Farm, although elements of both are present. Cusk has achieved something unique here. No description of the novel can hope to do justice to its mysterious strangeness. Very little happens. That is perhaps the key. So much is suggested. The drift into the bucolic, arcadian splendour is consistently undercut by the enigma of the protagonist and her long unexplained flight from London. Cusk builds a brooding sense of danger, but never reveals its source: even when we discover why Stella left London the sense of disquiet remains.

Like David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, The Lucky Ones (2003), Cusk’s fourth work of fiction, is more a collection of short stories united by common threads, overlapping incidents and characters, than a straightforward novel. By removing the ornate surface of her prose Cusk reveals the kind of lyrical, slow-burning, painterly attention to detail with which Alice Munro has become the world’s foremost fictional excavator of human relationships and interior life. Cusk examines the way in which lives collide, in which meaning is both lost and found in the world of the family. In The Lucky Ones circumstance, fate and pride contrive to strip life of its fairytale Disney World sheen. Mothers and fathers wrestle with lives changed by the experiences of cohabitation and parenthood. The novel communicates with great power the reality that life will not allow you time out from its trials just because you have children. This is a theme which Cusk also looks at in her remarkable memoir of motherhood, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001). She refuses to parade the sort of meaningless platitudes which Hollywood superstars are so taken by, choosing to deal with the effect of motherhood on the mechanics of her own life. She writes of the difficulty of losing her identity to the role of mother, the struggle to exist independently of her daughter, and the daily battle to keep working. Savage, caustic, unashamed and bleak, A Life’s Work is also extremely funny and tender. That it has appalled as many people as it has delighted suggests that the world is not yet ready for such honesty. However, I think Cusk’s take on the ‘world of milk and shadows and nothingness’ is inspired and inspirational writing, and, I should think, absolutely indispensable for anyone thinking of becoming a mother.
 
In In the Fold (2005) Cusk returns to the country setting of The Country Life. When the young Michael visits the remote family home of his friend he becomes enchanted by what he sees as the unconventional, bohemian ways of the Hanbury clan. Years later he returns. He is now a father and his marriage to Rebecca is beginning the slow slide to disintegration. What Michael discovers on his second visit disturbs his romantic view of the past, and his attachment to the ideal of a life unfettered by rules is challenged. Cusk’s treatment of the various faultiness in all of the relationships in this novel is exceptionally sensitive. She dissects innocuous moments – goodbyes, hellos, lunches, dinners, cups of tea around the kitchen table – revealing the accumulated breathlessness of compromise, lives that have become stilted because they have moved so far from youthful fancy that they no longer seem to be moving at all. Cusk finds the comedy and the pain inherent in the tension between novelty and routine. She examines the conflicting demands of safety and freedom with an ironic detachment, and her ability to capture the resulting psychological restlessness is extremely affecting.

Cusk’s most recent novel Arlington Park (2006) is a reworking of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. As a number of characters make preparations for a dinner party, we are taken in and out of their thoughts. These characters are solitary creatures, haunted by loneliness and mortality. Juliet is stifled by ‘the solid, bourgeois, profitable ordinariness of life,’ disturbed by the failure of her brilliant younger self to achieve all that was expected of her. Massie is experiencing an ‘unstable level of dissatisfaction’ which causes several angry outbursts at the expense of her own children and a woman in a car park. Christine appears to be optimistic and ebullient, but this is gradually revealed to be little more than a protective facade. Solly believes marriage should be ‘the state of hyphenation,’ and yet for most of the women in this novel it seems to be at the point of full stop. Although it is less opaque than Woolf’s novel, Arlington Park is equally strong on the constraints of routine and domesticity. This novel is an excavation of the deleterious effects of mundanity, which makes it a strangely terrifying read. Rather than generate a conventional sympathy for her characters, Cusk prefers to leave the reader with a slow building rage at the way a lack of colour in adult life stifles even the freest of souls.

Garan Holcombe, 2008

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Further reading on this site

Oxford Conference on the Teaching of Literature
The Oxford Conference investigates what it means to teach an increasingly international English language and literature, and also considers the contribution that literature can make to intercultural awareness. It takes... more...   (16/12/2003)

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Faber and Faber Ltd 3 Queen Square London  WC1N 3AU Tel: +44 (0) 20 7465 0045 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7465 0034 E-mail: gapublicity@faber.co.uk http://www.faber.co.uk

Agent The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd 17 Bedford Square London  WC1B 3JA England Tel: +44 (0)20 7908 5900 Fax: +44 (0)20 7908 5901 E-mail: mail@wylieagency.co.uk http://www.wylieagency.co.uk

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