BOOKS OF THE YEAR
BOOK OF THE DAY
Second Place by Rachel Cusk review – exquisitely cruel home truths
The deeply gendered experience of freedom is cunningly exposed in a shocking interrogation of art, privilege and property
Thursday 29 April 2021
I
f you wanted to locate a defining preoccupation in the consistently remarkable, formally daring fiction of Rachel Cusk, you might well alight on the issue of property. Cusk is obsessed with houses. Her revelatory Outline trilogy, completed in 2018 with the publication of Kudos, faltered on the awkward class politics of its central volume, in which the narrator’s efforts to renovate an ex-council flat are undermined by the inconvenient working classes living below.
