On the Cusk of austerity

John Self

RACHEL CUSK IS ONE OF THE MOST INteresting writers in Britain today, for both the content of her books and the path of her career. She started out as an extremely good practitioner of a well-established form: the comic novel of middle-class manners. Yet books like The Country Life (1997) and Arlington Park (2006) had a philosophical meatiness in their thinking that set them apart. And when the scathing response (“one of the worst things that ever happened to me”) to her memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath led to a creative crisis, we might have known that Cusk wouldn’t go quietly. Her response was to reforge her work in a way comparable to T.S. Eliot’s with Four Quartets: a new form for a new way of thinking about…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2024

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