What it feels like for a girl
The Country Life, by Rachel Cusk
Whenever you ask people if they’ve read Rachel Cusk, it goes something like this:
Yes, but only the Outline trilogy, and I:
love it more than anything, or:
loathe it more than anything;
Or:
No.
When people write or talk about Rachel Cusk they often seem to be discussing what women should and shouldn’t be as much as they are discussing this particular woman and her work. I think most of this started when she wrote a book about motherhood for which she got excoriated and lauded - from Cusk’s own telling, dolled out in fairly equal measure, but the bad was vicious and there was a tonne of both. People developed burning hot takes on Cusk the person, not just Cusk’s novels. Patricia Lockwood begins her LRB essay on the Outline trilogy: ‘The observation that some people do not like Rachel Cusk is so omnipresent in criticism of her work that it’s surprising no one’s ever led off a review with ‘I, too, dislike her.’ (That Lockwood essay, by the way, is an absolute delight - even if you have no interest in Cusk or her work.)
It is cruel and weird for people to be so obsessed with whether or not Rachel Cusk is an acceptable woman, but it is also fitting. All her novels are in some way or another about the way the Western world treats white women. About how women move through the world, through relationships, through men. Over the last, hateful, year I read her first four novels Saving Agnes, The Temporary, Country Life and Arlington Park. They are that quite rare thing: properly clever literary fiction with a levity and wit that makes them an absolute joy to read. And they are stories, too; almost old-fashioned in their story-ness.
The Country Life, which for me is the highlight of these four novels, is a sort of heroine’s journey. It draws on Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden with a delicious premise: Stella Gibbons leaves behind her life and husband to take a job as a nanny driving around a young non-able-bodied boy, except she can’t drive and she’s never been a nanny before. Stella gets into all sorts of scrapes while trying to find her feet and her place inside this family and the world writ large. It’s a simple, elegant structure - perfect for Cusk’s stylish prose, her propensity for long, looping sentences, and her unabashed use of obscure, sometimes archaic, words.
I stood naked in the centre of the room, immobilized by frustration, as when one is unable to accept that a solution to a ridiculous and unforeseen problem does not lie close to hand. Eventually, ashamed and filled with self-doubt, I began to dry myself inefficiently with the papery, flowered edge of the eiderdown on the bed. As I did so, I was reminded of a time when, as a very small child, I had been caught on the lavatory with no paper, and had sat there casting about in a similar manner. Eventually, I had been driven to dab myself with a bath towel. (The very thing which now, of course, I lacked; the thought that I had had one surplus then, and had used it in such a wasteful manner, doubled my frustration.)
Most of the novel is spent like this inside Stella’s head - her confused, lonely, embarrassed and clutzy head. It is really hard to make being inside someone’s head entertaining for any length of time. Reading it feels like watching someone walk a tightrope rigged up between two Manhattan skyscrapers. Cusk is always in danger of falling on just the wrong side of the line: if you aren’t careful, warmth can rapidly become sentimental; interiority can become boring and one-note; a simple premise can be too flimsy a raft for a long trip. But Cusk walks the line perfectly.
Although we aren’t all Stella all the time, we have all been some of Stella some of the time. As you root for Stella in her moments of pitiful loneliness, excruciating embarrassment and woeful entanglement, you are also rooting for the version of yourself that’s experienced all of this at one time of another. It’s corny, but this is a novel which does that thing people talk about literature doing: it makes you feel less alone in the world.
***
I don’t think you can ever have a bad time reading a Cusk novel, so if you read and love The Country Life then you’ll enjoy the others, too. And she’s always worth listening to - especially when talking about her non-fiction. Her interview with the writer Chris Power from a few years ago is excellent if you fancy some heavyweight discussion of form in writing, morality in writing and the like.