In Second Place, M cannot be properly seen. In the Outline trilogy, the narrator rarely speaks. She is rendered invisible, she realises, because her “used-up female body was disgusting to him”. Her fear is that he finds her repelling, and that she exudes something abject that is endemic to the discomfort she feels towards her own womanhood. “Why not?” M asks, but she is never dignified with a response. L isn’t interested in the landscape, and when M asks if he could paint her, he refuses, replying that he “can’t really see” her. M is drawn to this despite him patronising her writing and avoiding her at every turn. He is contrarian a man who “could not be controlled”, “caught” or “coerced”. L arrives, but the relationship is fraught. She wanted to see her immediate world through his eyes, to have him paint it, and she believed this would give her “a version of the freedom I had wanted my whole life”.

Conflating the power of art with that of the artist, she thought L had the ability to transform her.

Years later, happily married to her second husband, Tony, and living in a house on the marsh, she wrote to L and invited him to stay, offering him their second place, a cottage in the woods, where he might work. His paintings had a profound effect on her, leaving her in a “strange, exalted state”, and she sensed a deep kinship with the artist.

Some time ago, when M was living through a crisis, she found herself drawn to the works of a famous artist, known as L. The novel opens with M, a writer, telling someone called Jeffers about a recent upheaval in her life. Lawrence’s stay with her in Taos, New Mexico. Second Place is inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir of D.H. The answer comes with Second Place (Faber Fiction), a work that doesn’t mark a break with Cusk’s distrust of narrative, but heralds a deepening of her investigations. A landmark series that gutted the novel of many of its conventions, it was hard to imagine what Cusk would do with fiction after this. In Rachel Cusk’s extraordinary Outline trilogy (2014–18), her narrator adopts a stance of radical passivity she rarely talks, mainly listens and ventriloquises the stories of others. After her landmark ‘Outline’ trilogy, the author’s latest novel is inspired by a memoir about D.H.

Outline trilogy rachel cusk