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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quietly furious mothers of suburbia, 25 Nov 2006
If you want a plot-driven read, then Cusk isn't for you; nevertheless I did find this book a page-turner. The chapters are linked by the the location, Arlington Park - a well-heeled suburb that is Not London - and by the women who live there, weighed down by husbands and families, appearing normal on the outside, but inwardly fuming. Cusk is very good at describing women momentarily "losing it" with complete strangers, or their children, and it is the way in which she captures her characters' inner dialogues and their very ordinary and all-too-recognisable dramas that makes her work compelling. No quick fixes, no obviously cheery endings. I did expect a little more from the final chapter where characters from the previous chapters are brought together for a dinner party, which is why I'm giving it four stars rather than five, but nevertheless it's a powerful book.
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21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"The monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud", 9 Jan 2007
In her highly metaphorical novel, Arlington Park, author Rachel Cusk continues to skewer the lives, loves and hidden passions of the British middle-class. Using the metaphor of a rain-soaked and ominously cloudy day, Cusk writes a chilly and compellingly realistic story of five thirty-something women all mired in marital dissatisfaction and family dysfunction.
In the opening act we meet 36-year-old Juliet who is beginning to see the sheen coming off her life. Juliet and Benedict, her husband have come to Arlington Park because of Benedict's job teaching underpriviledged kids in a local failing school. Juliet has an average lifestyle, but is deeply unhappy with her confined life in this small town.
On a whim Juliet decides to get her all her hair cut off, hoping that by doing this she can transcend it all, including her dissatisfaction with her little house with its stained carpets, this town with its shopping and its flawed people. If only Juliet she could find a place less cramped, less confining, and "open out all the petals packed inside her."
Meanwhile, not far away, Amanda feels strangely naked as she begins to suspect some inadequancy in herself and her husband James. Lately, a feeling of precariousness had been steadily beseiging her and she's torn between the life she's actually living in Arlington Park and her feelings about it. Like Juliet, Amanda too is plagued by a type of "sterility of life," as though her heart has no love in it; she's living a life that's just too ordinary.
Solly, on the other hand, has a life that seems full and loaded with "too much fat." Her and her husband are constantly needing money, consequently up until now Solly's life has been defined by shallow opinions of society's expectations and this constant urge for material gain. Now pregnant for the fourth time, Solly suddenly feels aerated and overblown, whilst her husband seems to be corresponsingly hardening into a lean vertical type masculinity. Perhaps the most outwardly frustrated of all the girls, Solly is sure that there is layer of her that is irretrievably lost.
It comes as no surprise that Maisie has similar problems: Maisie shouts at her daughter, telling her that she's ruining her life, whilst throwing her lunchbox at the kitchen wall. Maisie just can't seem to gather together those transitory moments of peace and serenity that she so wishes for. Feeling like a ''boat in a harbor where the tide has gone out, lying helplessly on her side in the mud,'' Maisie is frustrated with parenthood and would probably be more satisfied with a life of self-gratification.
Full of the "deposits of waisted days" and wishing that this strange life hadn't reeled them in, these women go about their lives encumbered with discontent. Whilst some of them visit a large encapsulated shopping mall called Merrywood, finding satisfaction in lunch and shopping, others take the kids to school, go to the hairdressers, and shop for dinner.
Besides their obvious insecurities they seem all determined to be good wives and good mothers, "we all are feeding our families these healthy meals and taking our children to piano lessons and making our houses all perfect."
Focusing more on character than plot, Cusk writes of a single day in the lives of these women, culminating in a dinner party held by the boistrous Chistine, perhaps the most lively and easily recognizable of the girls. Chistine too has been suffering retrospective fear of inauthenticity which seemed to reveal to her the vulnerabitity of her grasp on the real and the authentic life.
Cusk's grim vision of the seemingly rootless existence of suburban middle-class life, may come across as unnecessarily bleak, but what really elevates the story is the author's startling capacity for weaving the interior lives of her characters into the clamoring external world of the leafy and rain-soaked town of Arlington Park.
The monstrous, "unpeopled palaces of cloud" gather, whilst the rain falls on empty avenues and its well-pruned hedges, equally penestrating these womens' dreams as "a sound like the sound of uproarious applause." Arlington Park is without a doubt a scathing indictment of British suburban life, with its instant wish fulfillment, its unbridled consumerism, and the great battering waves of mood and mortality that seem to have taken over towns such as this.
It is a startling view, though not necessarily a reassuring one, and as the rain continues to fall, grey and unvailing, "the endless alternation of storm and calm," it almost becomes like sorrow for these characters and seems to preclude every other possiblity, every other shade of feeling or even being for them. Mike Leonard January 07.
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29 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
suburban bliss, 20 May 2007
Rachel Cusk has quietly been writing exciting fiction for years. She has been recognised on a literary level - her first novel, Saving Agnes, won The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Country Life won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones was shortlisted for The Whitbread Novel Award, and In The Fold was longlisted for The Booker Prize. Yet commercial success has eluded her somewhat. I have always felt my entreaties to friends to read some Cusk, which have been ongoing for more than a decade, fell on deaf or indifferent ears.
Cusk's subject matter has visibly changed throughout her career. Saving Agnes and The Temporary dealt with girls seeking career success. The Country Life focused on romance, friendship and betrayal. The Lucky Ones came next, followed by In The Fold , which looked at family life and the allure of other people's lives, especially when unconventional. And sometime around there, Cusk became a mother and wrote her non fiction book A Life's Work, which expressed the ambiguity of motherhood, the drudgery of caring for a small child and the loss of self. This latter caused quite a distraught flapping of mother hen wings - to say that motherhood was tiring and boring was tantamount to sacrilege. But Cusk's obvious intelligence and writing talent pulled her through, and deep down many mothers thought she'd hit the nail firmly on its mobile-dangling head.
Arlington Park is a natural progression from that. Following the lives of a disparate group of women through 24 hours in the desirable but stifling suburbs, it homes in on the disatisfaction and ennuie in their lives. There is Juliet, an English teacher at the local High School, who silently rages over the fact that her husband Benedict, fulfilled in his role as inspirational teacher in a failing school, leaves her with most of the monotonous child care for their two kids Katherine and Barnaby. There is Amanda, who keeps her house obsessively clean to the point where she is more concerned about it than about the happiness of her toddler son Eddie. There is Solly, swollen with her fourth pregnancy, who slips into the beguiling world of her various lodgers to escape mundanity. Then there is Christine, comfortably bigoted and devoid of any insight, who wants to lure desirable people to Arlington Park - creative but not too creative, colourful but not of skin. And there is Maisie, object of Christine's lust for moneyed white blood for the area, recently moved to Arlington Park from London with her husband and two daughters.
Cusk writes with her characteristic ability to delight the reader with wry, arch wit and dry, deadpan irony. Her crisp prose draws the hilarity from everyday situations. This may be the illogical rage focused on insignificant objects which happen to be around when one is consumed by livid anger. Juliet's teeth-grinding savagery directed at an opera singer whose dulcet French tones her husband admires, and who is pictured on the sleeve of a record wearing a ballgown on a beach, is an example: 'Of course her French was exquisite! She hadn't had to spend her life looking after Benedict, buying food for him, washing his clothes, bearing and caring for his children! Instead she had thought about herself: she had brushed up her French and then gone down to the beach in her ballgown.' Or, the humour may be understated and derived from description of children's behaviour. Amanda glimpses in her car mirror and sees her toddler Eddie reflected: 'Amanda could see him in the rear-view mirror, self-absorbed and slightly shifty. He kept looking up, apparently to check for unwelcome developments, such as a turn off the High Street to the right that might signify he was being taken to nursery'. Juliet's two children, with the contrasting amost pious goodness of Katherine and the infuriating naughtiness of Barnaby, are another source of laughs.
Cusk has lost none of her ability to sparkle, but there is an underlying bleakness to this book that makes it more dispiriting than her earlier novels. Her disatisfaction with the slavery of motherhood carries into her prose, with most of the women here being unhappy in one way or another. This heaviness of topic at times feels excessive: surely the racist, smug Christine is beyond existential angst? And is it realistic that such a high proportion of the women could do with prozac added to the tapwater? Nevertheless, Cusk's sharp, funny prose and ability to express so much, from the banal to the complex, in intelligent, original language lifts this novel beyond its claustrophobic and depressing world view. Recognition has been a long time coming to Cusk, but she is one of the most important female authors in Britain today.
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