Painfully, the narrator is made aware of “the feeling of invisibility I very often had, now that I lived a life in which I was very rarely commented on”. When she meets Brett for the first time, Brett first scrutinises, and then, in an act of brazen disregard for personal boundaries, touches the narrator’s hair, finding it “really quite dry”. This is a person for whom control and comfort are effectively the same thing. “I feared, suddenly, that my belief in the life I was living wouldn’t hold, and that all I’d built up would collapse underneath me and I’d be unhappy again.” In its apparent excess, her panic is telling. “It wasn’t at all how I’d planned it!” she tells Jeffers.

Even before meeting her, the narrator senses in this uninvited addition a profound and destabilising danger. L, though, upends this mechanism of order by bringing someone with him – a young and beautiful companion called Brett. After some delays and distractions, L accepts.Īccessed by invitation only, the Second Place allows for a carefully managed titration of human contact into the narrator’s calm but distanced world. There is no doubt in her mind that L must be the next artist she invites to inhabit the Second Place. The experience is revelatory, transcendent. Alone in Paris, the narrator happens across an exhibition of paintings by an artist she refers to as L. It’s a telling balance of opposites in a novel devoted to the difficulties of feeling complete. The narrator is never named, and Jeffers is neither seen nor contextualised. Where the Outline trilogy centred the act of listening – the narrator often receding while the people she met recounted the details of their lives – Second Place re-establishes a more singular viewpoint, taking the form of either a letter or a slightly breathless address to someone called Jeffers. Second Place, it turns out, is a novel less about property, and more about the boundaries and misplaced emotional investment for which property is a proxy. This is, however, a Cusk novel, and in Cusk novels the surface, as experienced by reader and characters alike, invariably proves too fragile to be trusted. On the surface, then, this is a novel of glaring privilege, steeped in a mode of middle-class existence so rarified that the “lower things” must never be allowed to intrude. Now the narrator invites artists to use it as a kind of retreat, or, as she puts it, “a home for the things that weren’t already here – the higher things”. With the help of a group of men “who all help one another when there’s physical work to be done”, the cottage on the property was renovated.

The narrator and her husband bought it “to prevent it from being misused”, or to put it another way, to prevent any disturbance to the boundaries of their idyll.

The Second Place began as a “parcel of wasteland” adjoining the main property.

Review of second place by rachel cusk