Now, of course, Luhan is a footnote in literary history, the fate of so many patrons of the arts, and of so many women who formed attachments to Great Male Artists.Ĭusk’s version of Mabel - ‘M’ - is not quite the wealthy dilettante, her artistic enthusiasm crudely masking sexual and social appetites, that the caricature of such women has often relied on. Written in 1932, many years after the visit, it is a portrait not only of Lawrence, but of Luhan, and of their tricky relationship. Lawrence’s stay at the artists’ colony that the author had established in New Mexico. Second Place, which in bare-bones description tells of what happens if you invite an artist into your home, ‘owes a debt’ (the author’s words, in an afternote) to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos, an account of D.H. If it doesn’t, though, it is precisely the elements that flirt with disaster that will likely make it both superficially distinctive and artistically substantial.įor the novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk, whose most recent creation, the ‘Outline’ trilogy, attempted a savage blending of the two forms, risk comes frequently in the form of sailing dangerously - and, for her admirers, thrillingly - close to the parodic. M had her life transformed by L’s paintings many years earlier, and he eventually accepts her repeated invitations to stay and work in her “second place,” arriving in severely reduced circumstances due to some unspecified national disaster.A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness - not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that the work will collapse into some or other version of nonsense. Her latest novel, “Second Place” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 183 pages, $25), is a reverse-negative of the “Outline” books, as it is narrated by a middle-age woman, known as “M,” who is in thrall to a wizard-like artist, in this case an aging painter called “L.” M lives in a picturesque property on a coastal marshland-the setting is unnamed and somewhat fablelike-where she and her husband Tony have built a guest house. Cusk calls the “power of silence” a redoubtable narrative authority-that of the sorcerer or puppet master who coerces others into the dangerous work of self-exposure. Faye says and gives away almost nothing, achieving through what Ms.

Though centered on a writer named Faye, the chapters of these books are occupied with the stories of her acquaintances.

Rachel Cusk’s “Outline” trilogy of novels blazed a trail in what might be thought of as the anti-confessional mode.

Second place by rachel cusk