A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy. A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma—and disrupts the calm of her secluded household. Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift—and to destroy.

Everyone who read the subread liked it, although half of us qualified that by saying that they didn't like the characters or understand the point. We all noted how it was a very different book than Outline; where the Outline series views the protagonist with next to no access to her interiority, Second Place is completely trapped in the narrator's head as she winds her way through her own self-defeating and overly analytic encounter with an artist-as-devil houseguest named L. We really liked how Cusk used this very tight scenario -- having L, and surprisingly a young woman, stay in the guest house of the narrator and her husband -- became almost a devil's temptation story of how the narrator relates to the manipulative and ultimately parasitic painter she invites to stay in her estate. Even though the approach was different here, Cusk retains her extremely sharp observational powers and very strong writing, and none of us knew where the book was going to go. That said, we were left with a lot of questions. If the whole story is a set of letters to Jeffers about what happened at the house that season, who is Jeffers? Another artist the narrator is fawning over? A confident and friend? A literary device? The main character was also perplexingly contradictory -- recognizing her daughter's unequal relationship with her husband but still looking for validation from an evil man, being clear-sighted on everyone else's character but so deeply blind on her own. In a longer novel, we might have been frustrated not to have resolution to these ambiguities, but in this short piece, we were comfortable not knowing. And given that there were so many funny moments, well-written characters, and interesting scenes, we enjoyed it thoroughly regardless of our criticisms. Yeah the narrator's husband Tony is a bit manic pixie perfect and yeah it was a very odd choice of content, but Cusk maintains her status among us as a masterful writer of interestingly sparse stories.