“I told you once, Jeffers”, with these words begins Rachel Cusk’s new novel “The Other Place”. Who is this Jeffers whom the protagonist will address page by page by name and to whom she has apparently always entrusted her inner being? We won’t find out. Only the brief post-comment reveals that the novel is to be regarded as a new “version” of an older model, indeed as an homage to it. And what did N, writer and main character, once tell that Jeffers? “I told you once, Jeffers, how I met the devil on a train from Paris.”
Back when she met the devil on the train, who was also accompanied by a “shocking young thing”, N, as Jeffers already knows and we are now experiencing, was going through a serious life crisis. They freed two men from this crisis: Tony, her new everyday partner, with whom she now lives in seclusion in the southern English marshes, and L, a world-famous painter, whose pictures she tells N es Jeffers at the height of her crisis of self-destruction. While Tony embodies nothing but practical reason, L could be the revenant of the devil she met on the train.
Anyone who has read Rachel Cusk’s famous “Outline” trilogy knows that the author surrounds her own life “autofictionally”, in a style that is almost frustratingly sparse and at the same time is characterized by great clarity. In Cusk’s novels, it seems, past experiences of loss and crises are both re-awakened and poorly tamed by the rigid form. It’s the same here. The carefree rural everyday life with Tony does not save N from the onslaught of dark passions. That sounds a bit cheesy for Rachel Cusk’s sobriety. But how else can one describe it when N has heard from L, the painter prince, an inner wake-up call of Rilke proportions? She thinks she has to change her life.
The “aura of absolute freedom” is “male down to the last brushstroke”
The subject, the “version” of which this novel provides based on a literary model, is, in short, the egomaniacal star artist’s break into a rural idyll, including the devastation that this stay brings with it for everyone involved. In other words, it is about an artist residence that is getting out of hand. N seems obsessed with L, or at least with his pictures, which you and only you want to say: “I’m here.” Therefore, after many years, N now invites L to work at the “other place”, the second home on her rural property. L, demanding, manipulative and unpredictable, agrees after some back and forth and, to N’s surprise, brings along a young woman with a sophisticated vita, who is also not very engaging in human terms.
What you get to see from now on is an increasingly oppressive and visibly unpleasant intimate play for everyone involved. Because of the pandemic, N’s daughter from her first marriage and her boyfriend are also present, whereupon all imaginable negative dynamics between the couples or non-couples arise as if by themselves. The spoiled and arrogant L and the surprisingly devoted N, who in her boundless desire for rescue, to be seen and painted, act as the drivers of the fate, not willing to leave out any cliché of an older art and artist metaphysics.
Of course, this Cusk novel is again “awkward” in a perfect way (unfortunately there is no better word in German). But this time there are also some weaknesses. At least if you want to take N’s character speech seriously. N tells, and Jeffers has to listen to it all without being asked, a lot of enthusiastic nonsense, for example about L’s painting and its “aura of absolute freedom, which was fundamentally, relentlessly and masculine down to the last brushstroke”. From this almost pathological humility towards a certain male art practice, all sorts of assumptions arise about the fundamentally amoral nature of the “artist’s soul”.
Who cares about the problems toxic men bring with them?
It is different with us normal mortals. “Our bias”, says N, “increases in the course of life so that at some point we can accept the limits of fate: the artist, on the other hand, has to remain vigilant, resist temptation and wait for the call of truth”. It remains a mystery why the answer to N’s often articulated discomfort about being a woman, about gender roles and body images is to be handed over to a male artist despot. But this is exactly what, it seems, N has invited the painter into the house: so that he can thoroughly shatter her ideal world, which is already on fragile feet.
Because a lot here, even if it is set in the present, seems so remote from time, because it is just as difficult to imagine the demonic painter idol of today as the female lust for the problems that such men bring with it, the question arises another book to which Cusk’s novel wants to pay homage. Only this much can be revealed: The artist residency referred to here between the lines took place almost a hundred years ago. In a different place, in a different art form, but apparently with similar difficulties. Perhaps, one thinks in the end, Rachel Cusk (but why only?) Wanted to re-pose questions and problems of an artistry that was as “toxic” back then as it is today.