A new book explores how Rachel Cusk’s writing illustrates a conflict between restlessness and stasis – an attention to the ways in which time pauses and passes
Canadian writer Rachel Cusk and her works are explored in a new book titled Rachel Cusk: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Roberta Garrett and Liam Harrison. Photograph: Stéphane De Sakutin/AFP via Getty Imagesin 1967, she spent her early childhood in Los Angeles before moving to East Anglia in the UK to be educated at a private Catholic girls’ school. She attended New College, Oxford in the late 1980s and moved toin the early 1990s.
The opening chapter of Saving Agnes captures a disjuncture between the required performance of female empowerment and the inner lives of young women living in a patriarchal culture that makes few real concessions to their needs: “Agnes usually managed to sustain the appearance of a thrusting young professional running on a tight schedule; but then someone switched on the lights, pulled off the mask, revealed the pretender for exactly who she was.
The next phase of Cusk’s writing career was initiated by the 2012 memoir Aftermath, about her divorce from her second husband, Adrian Clarke. “Nothing belongs to me any more. I have become an exile from my own history,” Cusk writes. “I no longer have a life. It’s an afterlife; it’s all aftermath.
Echoing the criticism that, several years earlier, was directed at A Life’s Work, Aftermath was dismissed as pretentious and self-indulgent. In The Sunday Times,how it is such a commonplace confession to dislike Cusk and expressed surprise that no one has ever begun a review of her work with: “I, too, dislike her.”
Cusk’s response after publishing Aftermath was to abandon the notion of character almost completely. The Outline trilogy breaks down boundaries between fiction and life writing, as the narrator and protagonist, Faye, appears to be a lightly fictionalised or autofictional version of Cusk herself.
The narrator in one section of Parade is assaulted on the street in a random attack, and this narrative disrupts the withdrawal of character and lack of corporeality that we see in the Outline trilogy. As the narrator notes, “the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares”.
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