The sentences aren’t so concentrated as before, and they don’t culminate, like Faye’s, in lyrical beats-they just keep going, half-breaths in a long-rambling speech. The novel starts with a talkative narrator in medias res: “I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting, the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life.” Cusk signals that she will occupy a voice more involved than in the trilogy, marked by plenty of exclamation points, mixed metaphors, and a garrulous looseness. The narrator, Faye, listens more than she speaks, and she creates her presence through her absence, through the outline she forms in her milieu.įrom the first sentence, then, Second Place announces itself as different. Reading those books felt like eavesdropping on the calm, perceptive conversations of strangers in cafes. Her Outline trilogy redefined the narrator, as it abandoned characterization, plot, and description for the reported speech of others set in a cool, distant tone. You can hear the difference in Rachel Cusk’s new novel.
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