Book Review: Rachel Cusk: The Slow Construction of a Writing Life by Cynthia Newberry Martin - Page 2

The Country Life was a delightful book to read, full of strong images, such as “…I turned off the light, closed my eyes, and forced myself, as one would force the head of a man beneath water to drown him, into sleep.”

Rachel Cusk’s fourth book, published in 2001, is a memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. Cusk wins my heart when she admits, in the Introduction, that it would be contrary to the nature of motherhood to write a book about the subject without explaining how she found the time to write it. The answer is that her partner quit his job to take care of the children so that she could write her book about taking care of the children. This memoir is one woman’s experience of motherhood. Unfortunately, Cusk was attacked by readers and reviewers as being selfish and immature instead of being praised for honestly portraying the transition from taking care of self to taking care of a child. Cusk described it as “a period in which time seemed to go round in circles rather than in any chronological order.” The baby developed colic. Cusk became sleep-deprived. It wasn’t pretty or easy. However, at the end of three months:

I see that she has become somebody. I realize, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence.

I recommend this memoir to every woman contemplating, or in the throes of, motherhood. My only objection is that perhaps a better title would have been simply On Becoming a Mother, as these pages are limited to the initial weeks and months after the baby is born, to this transition time of becoming a mother, which the author so clearly does.

The Lucky Ones, published in 2004, is Rachel Cusk’s fifth book, and with it, Cusk begins a period of experimentation. In this book, it’s with form. There’s a Contents page, which announces five sections, each of which could stand alone as a story. In each section, also, there’s a passing reference to at least one character in another section. With a lovely circularity, the last section ends with, I believe, the only reference to the main character in the first section. This would be a wonderful collection of linked stories. But the book, on its cover, calls itself a novel. I don’t think so. Still, the author’s writing throughout is even better in this book than her last. In the final section of The Lucky Ones, Cusk goes into that depth of truthfulness that characterizes a work of substance. Her skill in crafting images to send the words on their way is evident in the following paragraph:

It was in the mornings that Vanessa most often suspected the existence of a problem. In the rumpled dawn camouflage of her bed she would open her eyes and think of the coming day and sometimes, just as when sometimes she turned the key in the ignition of her old Honda, nothing would happen. She lay there, paralyzed by the image of what she had both to construct and then to dismantle before being returned to this same bed, like a book being returned to its shelf, intact and yet somehow depleted of her information.

Article Author: Cynthia Newberry Martin

Cynthia Newberry Martin is a writer whose work has appeared in Contrary and Storyglossia, among other journals. Her first novel, The Painting Story, was a finalist in the Emory University Novel Contest. She writes "catching days," a blog on reading, writing, and life, and is working on a new novel. …

Visit Cynthia Newberry Martin's author page — Cynthia Newberry Martin's Blog