ARLINGTON PARK
Rachel Cusk
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0374100802
ISBN-13: 9780374100803

• Reading Group Guide

Rachel Cusk, a Whitbread Award winner, has written a number of books about parenting and motherhood, including A LIFE'S WORK: On Becoming a Mother, a serious and somewhat sad look at her changing life. But ARLINGTON PARK is a stunner --- a depressing, sustained bummer of a book that is written so poetically and with such literary panache that it cannot be put down or ignored, no matter how painful it is to read.

The females in this novel chase things outside of their daily lives, whether they be second-rate careers, vestiges of lost femininity, or God; not one woman is content with her situation. Adding to their overall morose and introspective behavior is the reality of pounding relentless rain that accompanies their every task, from ill-fated coffee dates to lunch at a nearby mall or dressing for dinner parties. As Amanda (the nervous nellie who buries herself in housework), Juliet (the feminist thinker and teacher), Solly (who feels her feminine spirit has been diminished), Christine (funny but depressing) and Maisie (who is, as the jacket copy records, "despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed") move through this day, small and simple details around them inspire great and swelling discourses --- inner and outer --- about the harsh realities of the choices they've made.

Hemmed in by the well-planned community in which they live, gazing at the freedom of a place like London in the physical and emotional distance, these women are good and stuck, suffocated, oppressed, horribly unhappy. As Christine thinks later in the book, "She lived in terror of her expulsion from the light. She lived in the front of her brain until it hurt." Even cooking is filled with greater meaning, with the symbols of an iconography that warrants great caution in the staving off of psychological disaster.

In some ways, ARLINGTON PARK is laid out like a video game: there are the players, and the obstacles they must move through in order to get to the winner's circle. In this case, the obstacles are mostly human: men who don't appreciate, understand or need the same way that the women do, and children who are basically there to remind each woman of her failures --- of being too well educated and prepared for something else that has never come to fruition, of being frightened of the clutchy, needy beings that their bodies have created (Solly is even pregnant as the story unfolds). It's a very dark and dismal place that they live in, their mental states matching the natural distress that pushes at them with wind and water. As far as the winner's circle is concerned, it's too far away for any of them to find.

The unrelenting craziness of motherhood is a fantastic canvas for Cusk's resonant poetry. Like MRS. DALLOWAY or ULYSSES (to use some big-time classic literature for comparison), ARLINGTON PARK reaches for a broad and expansive inner state that rages against the confines of the outer one. It is a book that calls you to it with your every cerebral impulse firing, requiring you to be fully present when you're reading it.

But beware: even if you are a lover of great and challenging art, the realities of these characters' lives will leave you more than a bit unbent --- like watching yourself in a mirror for too long --- but you will be glad you took the journey anyway. If only there was some humor here, ARLINGTON PARK would be a perfect book.

   --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

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