The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk
I
So we know what kinds of books she doesn't admire. Down with the past, down with the future, down with the fantastical, the far-flung, the feathery: on your bike, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Milton - and take the brothers Grimm with you. From what she writes herself, we deduce what she would like the book group women to do: take a look at what goes on daily in their own kitchens. She writes to rebut the idea that domestic life, as subject matter, is trivial and whimsical; no one, after all, finds these defects in John Updike. But she is no grime-addict. Her interiors whisper and shiver, as if Virginia Woolf had flitted through. The hours of the day pass through the body of a house, "the sun moving in golden panels across the floorboards".
The action of her seventh novel occupies one year, September to September, and the story is about three brothers, their families and their parents: Thomas, aged 41, newly deployed as a househusband; Antonia his wife, newly promoted to head of her English department; Thomas's elder brother Howard, his younger brother Leo, their various households. Cusk inspects the sibling bond with the thoroughness Ivy Compton Burnett used to bring to the job. Like that author she has an eye, and an ear, for tyrants and manipulators. This is a short novel, and we would like to know the characters better. The more monstrous they are, the more we would like to know them. The father of the three brothers is a lifelong bully of a very particular type: "Leo hears it, that tone, the way it goes over everything, and mechanically levels it, like a tank ... He has never heard his father raise his voice. There has been no need to raise it." There is the teenage daughter who tosses her mane of hair like a recalcitrant Shetland pony, and has "the same spirit of animal vigour about her, the same disproportion of flesh to rationality". Cusk is curt and merciless with her own creations. Even a needy Jack Russell pup has his character scrutinised, and earns his fate, his blackly farcical comeuppance.
Thomas the househusband is learning to play the piano, and the musical references are insistent, as if Cusk thought they were what would hold the novel together; but what holds it together is the skewering quality of her observation. The piano lessons and rehearsals point to another, larger preoccupation - the novel begins by asking "What is art?" The question really is what is it for these people? There is a comic portrait of a mother who insists she is a lapsed artist, and would get to "my studio" if only the chains of duty were looser. Her studio is perhaps too near her house. We know she is compromised, she is self-deluding, she will always arrange some childcare crisis that will prevent her going down the garden path to confront her malnourished talent. Art will never fail these people, but they will fail themselves. They have the intelligence to examine their lives and diagnose what they lack, but they do not have the force of will to grasp what they need. They find it hard to break out of the shell of self, and imagine others as fully alive; they share food, share beds, but there are vast unexplored spaces between them, where their illusions go to shrivel up and die.
It is the author's mix of scorn and compassion that is so bracing. Sometimes she complicates simple things, snarling them in a cat's cradle of abstraction, but just as often, a sentence rewards with its absolute and unexpected precision. A child's eyes are "brown, tawny: in the half-light they seem rich with age, like mahogany". The best moments in her novel are moments of stillness, when the whole of a family, a house, a season, seems suspended, as if in a drop of water for us to examine: "It is October, and the garden is gilded with yellow light. The grass is sodden in the mornings ... She watches the children playing after school in the crisp late afternoon. Their bodies have lost the fluidity of summer, though the weather is fine. They move around the rectangle of lawn in their uniforms, laughing and jostling, throwing sticks for Skittle and laughing when he bounces up to catch them smartly between his jaws. Later, when they have come in and the garden is wrapped in its blue-grey pall of evening, Claudia looks through the window and sees Skittle cavorting alone in the indistinct light. He leaps in the air, his jaw snapping at invisible sticks. She watches his white twisted form, suspended. She can hear the murmur of television from the other room."
It is a reverential moment, like the moment captured in Carol Ann Duffy's poem "Prayer", and it is a virtuoso moment: see how the word "cavorting" traps the leap, the curved and compact form of the dog. It stays on the inner eye, transformative, when the incidents of the story have died away. Cusk's preoccupations, no doubt, are elitist, her narratives slight, her stylistic ambition pronounced. On each of these counts she has received her measure of dislike and distrust from critics and readers. In a review last year of her Italian memoir The Last Supper, Alexander Chancellor ended by saying plaintively: "I sometimes wish that Cusk would hide her cleverness a little." Now why would she want to do that? She has a task and she applies herself to it soberly: the trapping, if only in a mirrored surface, of some fragment of reality that might yield a truth about the whole.
