Reviews of Second Place by Rachel Cusk

Media Reviews

O, the Oprah Magazine Cusk, a virtuoso of our interior lives and the author of the renowned Outline Trilogy, here spins a captivating, compulsively readable tale—part confession, part allegory—that unflinchingly peers into the crevices of relationships.

Vulture (Most Anticipated) The plot is simple, but the way it unfolds is as nuanced as ever, narrated in M's second person to someone offstage. As with Cusk's Outline trilogy, it takes seriously the complex emotional geometries between ordinary people. Second Place is a deeply philosophical book about what happens when you confuse art with life.

New York Times It's as if Cusk has been reading Joyce Carol Oates's best novels. She digs into the gothic core of family and romantic entanglements. I filled the margins with check marks of admiration, but also with exclamation points. This novel pushes its needles into the red...If I could have rubbed a lamp and lightened this book's lurid intensities, I might have. It is not a novel that gladdens the soul. But gladdening the soul has never been Cusk's project.

NPR Cusk grapples with [D.H. Lawrence's] spirit in Second Place, her first novel since the Outline Trilogy, which is one of the great fictional achievements of the new millennium. Where those crystalline novels were largely plotless and had the chilly burn of dry ice, this fascinating book finds her moving in a messier new direction...[Cusk] writes with a knife-thrower's precision and showmanship.

Paris Review Whatever it is we want from [Rachel Cusk], Second Place delivers in spades. And with the dynamism of a truly great writer, the novel seems written just for the spring of 2021 but was actually inspired by the memoir of Mabel Dodge Luhan, a patron who played host to D.H. Lawrence in Taos, New Mexico, in 1932...Cusk gives us three 'stages of women,' leaving hints of female truths I'll carry for the rest of my life, and no small amount of lush, threatening scenery.

The Guardian (UK) Her genius is that in deliberately blurring a boundary of her own – that between a writer and her subject, between the expectation of autobiography so often attached to writing by women, and the carapace of pure invention so often unthinkably afforded to men – she tricks us into believing that her preoccupations and failings, her privileges and apparent assumptions, are not our own. By the time we realize what has happened, it is too late: our own surface has been disturbed, our own complacent compartment dismantled. It is a shock, but as the narrator of Second Place reminds us, 'shock is sometimes necessary, for without it we would drift into entropy.'

Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Riffing on D.H. Lawrence's famously fraught visit with Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico, Cusk chronicles a fictional woman's attempt to find meaning in other people's art...Brilliant prose and piercing insights convey a dark but compelling view of human nature.

Library Journal (starred review) Once again, Cusk delivers a novel so thorny with ideas that every sentence merits a careful reading, yet crafted in language as ringingly clear as fine crystal...A gorgeously sculpted story of living and learning; for all readers.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) [I]ntelligent, sparkling...There is the erudition of the author's Outline trilogy here, but with a tightly contained dramatic narrative. It's a novel that feels timeless, while dealing with ferocious modern questions.

Reader Reviews

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