The Lucky Ones
Rachel Cusk Fourth Estate, 228pp, £15.99
ISBN 1857029127
Rachel Cusk's unsparing memoir, A Life's Work: on becoming a mother, condemned her to the role of spokeswoman for bewildered new mums everywhere. From her Whitbread-winning debut novel, Saving Agnes, her work has followed her own journey from single city girl to starting a family in the country. In The Lucky Ones, she stays with the subject of motherhood. While it might seem we have had quite enough contractions and colic from Cusk (along with certain other writers), she succeeds, as before, in making ordinary lives absorbing and absurdly tragic.
A series of linked short stories, The Lucky Ones deserves comparison to Helen Simpson's collection on the same theme, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life. An epigraph from a Katherine Mansfield story sets the tone for this quietly observed collection of linked short stories, which only falters when striving after gritty social drama, as in the first, drearily unconvincing narrative. Set in a women's jail, "Confinement" begins with the watery indignities of late pregnancy and ends with our luckless inmate giving birth in the back seat of a police car while wearing maternity leggings and handcuffs. Hard labour, imprisonment and injustice follow - having a baby is nothing short of a life sentence, it seems.
In stark contrast, the second story, set in the Alps, is an icy portrait of self-conscious, solipsistic thirtysomethings on a skiing holiday. Cusk almost makes us feel sorry for Martin, who has left his depressed wife and baby at home in a last attempt at freedom. The brute. As he stands at the top of the mountain, all poor Marty can see before him is a slippery slide into a sexless future and old age.
The book's heart belongs in leafy southern England. When returning to small-town satire, Cusk is safely back on home turf (or at least familiar lawns). Following a succession of women on the brink of a breakdown, The Lucky Ones recalls Michael Cunningham's equally cheerful The Hours. Another latter-day Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Daley is a local busybody and family bully who is preparing for her annual Christmas party, at which the book's disparate characters and storylines come dramatically together. Her pastry-making plans are interrupted with the arrival of her daughter, once the attractive, dangerously single woman in the skiing group, now milk-stained and suffering from postnatal depression (yes, another one). Her daughter's distress masks the collapse of Mrs D's apparently unshakeable existence. Mild-mannered Mr Daley decides, from the sanctity of the garden shed, that he can no longer tolerate his domineering wife: "You've taken my soul away," he declares with devastating finality. But the party must go on.
The five stories are connected by the Porters, smug weekenders from the city. Victor is a prestigious lawyer, and Serena, a celebrity in the village, writes a popular newspaper column about family life (a nod perhaps at Cusk's own recycling of real events). But their glossy lifestyle is not as it seems: Victor, according to one of his wife's jaunty dispatches, is dying from cancer. Again, this tragedy is played out against the noisy predicament of a young mother at the centre of the story, struggling with two small children, an unfaithful husband and looming debts. Who are the lucky ones in all this?
Chaos, despair and unexpected violence lurk beneath these stories of unremarkable domestic routine. In contrast to Cusk's earlier books, the intricate storylines are more tortuous than her prose. A distinctive stylist, she treats language with the greedy indulgence her fictional mothers lavish on their babies. While family resentments, infidelities and discord are hardly original themes, the clarity of her observations makes this mundane world seem freshly new.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
