Rachel Cusk
An interesting woman, Rachel Cusk. An award-winning, seven-time novelist, born in Canada and now living in Britain, Cusk ignited a firestorm with her 2001 memoir, A Life's Work: On Becoming A Mother. She was savaged for having had the temerity to state - in print! - that motherhood can at times be terrifying, overwhelming, alienating, exhausting and, yes, boring. It was generally hailed as the devil's handiwork ("a coruscating attack on motherhood" was the not uncommon refrain), and readers were warned - presumably on pain of causing rampant miscarriage - not to let the book fall into the hands of pregnant women.
Such a reaction was doubtless predictable; as Cusk herself wrote in a column at the time, she learned that "what is important is not what mothers feel, but what they say they feel." More interesting is her response to the fuss. "I would have ripped it up if I'd had the approval of those aliceband- [headband]wearing mumsies who disapproved of it," she said in a 2005 interview. "I wanted to speak to intelligent women."
Ah yes, the intelligent woman. How nice to see her addressed as a viable constituency; how pleasant to have her existence assumed. (It's easy to doubt, given even a modest glance at most media.) Granted, it's a statement that will not endear her to her enemies, and will probably breed more, but I have great expectations of a prickly writer willing to tackle so thorny a topic - the thinking, questing, potentially status-quo-busting woman and her position in contemporary Western society.
It's a theme she has addressed in previous novels - most recently the edgy, disconcertingly humorous Arlington Park (2006) - and she takes it on again in her latest, The Bradshaw Variations, a rumination on family life in which at least one long-standing convention - who stays home to look after the children - is turned on its head.
Thirty-nine-year-old Antonia (Tonie) Swann, recently promoted from part-time lecturer, now heads a university English department while her husband, Thomas Bradshaw, has taken the year off from his unspecified office job to look after their eight-year-old daughter, Alexa. They live in a "picturesque, convenient, middle-sized town an hour from London" with their Polish lodger, Olga. (And how refreshing, and characteristic of Cusk, that Olga does not become the target of Thomas's attentions.)
In the course of the book, which takes place during one year, we are introduced not just to the Bradshaw-Swann ménage but to Thomas's brother Howard, a big, booming, well-to-do entrepreneur, and to his wife, Claudia, who presides over their not unpleasantly topsy-turvy household.
Another brother, Leo, and his wife, Susie, make appearances, as do various in-laws, including Thomas's quietly vicious father and Tonie's poisonous mother, both of whom deeply disapprove of Thomas's decision to stay home. ("A man isn't a man if he's in the house all day," pronounces Tonie's mother, a woman of the married-for-life-but-not-for-lunch generation who brooks no dissent.)
It would be misleading, however, to suggest the book follows a straightforward narrative arc; this is not a novel in the conventional sense but a series of linked episodes in which characters habitually pause, sometimes for pages at a time, to reflect upon the nature of art, of reality, of solitude, of identity. ("Who is she?" ponders Tonie in a not-untypical passage. "What is she doing here in this room, with its sinister flowers, with its white shutters the wind and darkness seem to be trying to prise open?")
It's difficult to outline the plot, for there isn't a lot of it. Tonie works, comes home, attends the occasional party, or convention; Thomas seems less to look after his daughter than to pursue his goal of learning to play the piano. A potentially fatal mishap involving Alexa occurs - a development that seems disturbingly de rigueur in novels involving "unorthodox" mothers - but that too is folded over into the narrative, such as it is, and dealt with at a distance. The presiding colour is grey, the tone lugubrious, the atmosphere one of overwhelming anomie. (It's no accident that Thomas is struggling with a fugue, a fugue being both a musical composition and a disturbed state of mind in which one's sense of identity is lost.) There is much philosophizing and not much action, though there are set pieces of such searing acuity they are the more frustrating for being so beautifully done - you see what the book might have been.
Toward the end of the novel Olga, the lodger, struggles to describe her hosts. "They seemed both polymorphous and null," she thinks. "There was something iconic about them, something representative and wooden in the way they kissed or touched."
Yes: iconic and representative, vehicles for ideas but not characters you care for, or about. The Bradshaw Variations has moments of beauty to be sure - Cusk is too fine a writer for it not to. Now, if she would just condescend to emotion, and unite the fire that fuelled A Life's Work with her evident ability and her clearly fiercely held opinions, well then we'd have fireworks worth watching.
Great expectations dashed, then - but not demolished.
Kathleen Byrne, a Toronto-based editor and writer, frequently reviews for The Globe and Mail.