Briefly Noted

A Separation

The winter was bleak, cold, wet, cloudy, day after day, lasting for months. I need some sun, I wanted some sun.

It is why I read Katie Kitamura’s tale, A Separation, in which the nameless narrator travels to Greece to find out what happened to her former husband. She learns he is there or was supposed to be there, when his mother calls her to find out why he isn’t returning her phone calls.

His mother knows nothing of their separation and forthcoming divorce. The narrator agrees to travel to Greece to formalize the state of affairs between them.

He was last heard from in a small village in the southern Peloponnese where he has gone to research a book on the “weepers” who are paid to howl or wail at funerals in this part of the world. What she learns is that he was recently found dead, in a ditch not far from the hotel where he was staying.

The mystery of who killed him and for what reason forms the background of the novel. The narrator casually goes through the motions of learning what happened, as she goes from place to place and from person to person in a sunny Greek village in the Peloponnese.

The winter was a little brighter, a little warmer.

Transit

...whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others treated us. Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk's latest novel Transit unfolds in a series of encounters the writer, Faye, has when she moves her family to London after the collapse of her marriage. She chances upon her ex-boyfriend, who finds himself back in London, “straitjacketed in routine.” After Faye buys a run-down house, her remodeler tells her how much he misses his former life in Poland.

Her downstairs neighbors shout obscenities at her, complaining about all the banging and noise that occurs as the walls come tumbling down and the floors are being ripped up. Her children call her about their problems at school, the keys they lost to their apartment, and the difficulties of living with their father.

Then there is a student Faye is teaching how to deal with the thousands of pages she has accumulated but can’t figure out what to do with them. At her hairdressers she engages in a philosophical discussion with her hair stylist.

The chapters proceed in this fashion, as Faye mostly listens and questions the tales of the individuals she encounters. But we know next to nothing about Faye, the underlying conditions of her life or where she is headed next.

Cusk concludes, “I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next.”

Rachel Cusk's Outline

I found Part IV, the final section of Rachel Cusk’s serialized novel the least interesting of the four published in the Paris Review. There is scarcely any word from the unknown narrator who, when she does speak, sounds in many ways like the very Rachel Cusk herself.

You may remember in the first installment, an English writer travels to Greece in the summer to teach a month-long writing course. Seated next to her on the flight is an older Greek man who describes the failure of his two marriages and other family misfortunes. He invites her to take a boating excursion with him the next day.

Part II begins as they drive to a small boat harbor outside Athens. They continue their dialogue that, at times, is both amusing and stimulating. She swims far out to sea, all the while ruminating.

She notes that people can never change completely. Rather she believes whatever changes occur are latent, “had lain dormant, waiting to be evoked by circumstance.”

In the evening, after their boating trip, they meet for dinner in Athens with another writer. The talk is lively, serious, interesting. They talk about the meaning of the self, a person’s identity. And Cusk has the narrator say to my delight: “I thought the whole idea of a “real” self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self with you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.”

In the third segment of, Outline, Cusk writes about how often we are deceived in judging another person on the basis of their appearance. Knowing about the pitfalls of this bias does not prevent us from succumbing to it. But perhaps Cusk’s descriptions will keep us from falling prey to it as often as we usually do. It isn’t easy, except perhaps by ignoring physical appearance completely or learning to pause for a moment or two before you judge another person.

She also dwells at length on how individuals react to the same experience quite differently. Each person views the experience in the light of their own history and because each person’s history is unique, they are bound to attach a different meaning to the same experience. She describes the reactions of a woman, who had hoped to become a professional musician, as she was passing by an open window and recognized a piece of music she had always loved.

And instead of appreciating the beauty of the Bach piece, she felt an extraordinary sense of loss. The music she once loved no longer belonged to her and instead was possessed by someone else or so she felt.

Cusk gives generalities like this a life, she places them in concrete situations, situations that we may find ourselves experiencing. By doing this, I think she makes them far more memorable, with much greater impact than reading about a research study of the same phenomena.

Part IV opens with the students in her class commenting on an assignment she had given them. Each student speaks about how difficult it was to follow the teacher’s instructions to place an animal in his or her story. And as they do so, we come to learn about the emotional life of the student’s life.

The account shifts to a story told by the fellow writer who has come to replace the narrator at the end of her one-month teaching stint. Her replacement describes what her neighbor said on the plane flying to Athens. Again, Cusk resorts to the unknown person sitting next to someone on a flight to engage in a dialogue on a serious issue

As he unfolded his story, the replacement realizes he was describing what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative…Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown gave her, for the first time since the incident [rape] a sense of who she was now.

While the novel is difficult to summarize, certain themes seem to be evident in the encounters the narrator has with the people she meets – marriage and separation, the ties of parenthood, the struggles of reconciling them with one's identity and freedom. Each one of them draws upon Cusk’s personal experiences as reflected in her most recent novels.

The complete version of Outline will be published in this country on January 13, 2015. It was nominated for this year’s Goldsmith Prize which is designed “to reward a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best”

Rachel Cusk’s Outline, Part III

Two young law students walk into a lawyer’s office to interview for a position. You see one has tattoos on her left arm, stretching from her shoulder to her wrist. The other has no tattoos. Who do you think will be working at the firm?

There is little doubt about the answer. The bias that appearance plays on our judgments is among the most powerful sources of discrimination. We rely too heavily on a single feature of a person and then to anchor our judgment thereafter, on that characteristic or trait.

Inferences about a person based on their physical appearance are risky. Consider the same two examples when men are interviewing. They may have the same tattoos as the women, but because they are wearing a suit, shirt, and tie, they are unobservable.

Other cues must then be drawn upon to predict their future performance. Regardless, something about their appearance can often be decisive—are they clean-shaven, with well-combed hair, shoes shined, etc

Rachel Cusk gives examples of this bias in the third segment of her serialized novel, Outline, published in the Summer 2014 issue of the "Paris Review," #209. For example she writes,

It was quite common, the man to her left presently observed, for young people now to use their appearance as a means of shocking or disturbing others: he himself…had seen … tattoos and piercings of sometimes an apparently violent nature, which all the same said nothing whatever about their owners, who were often people of the greatest sweetness and docility. It had taken him a long time to accept this fact, for he was predisposed to be judgmental and to find the meaning of a thing commensurate with its appearance... and though he didn’t strictly speaking, comprehend why people might choose to mutilate themselves, he had learned not to read too much into it.

Cusk also dwells at length on how individuals react to the same experience quite differently. Each person views the experience in the light of their own history and because each person’s history is usually quite different than anyone else’s, they are bound to attach a different meaning to the same experience. She describes the reactions of a woman, who had hoped to become a professional musician, as she was passing by an open window and recognized a piece of music she had always loved.

And instead of appreciating the beauty of the Bach piece, she felt an extraordinary sense of loss. The music she once loved no longer belonged and instead was possessed by someone else or so she felt. Cusk writes:

Certainly another person, she said, passing that window and hearing the D minor fugue, would have felt something entirely different. In itself the music coming out of the window means nothing at all, … And even a person observing these events, she said, from across the road, could not have guessed, simply by seeing and hearing what the story really was. What they would have seen was a girl walking past, at the same time as hearing some music being played inside a building.

How little we know of another person, how easily we are deceived or mislead by what we can observe. How superficial that is and how easily we succumb to its influence with results that are often unfortunate. Of course, none of this is new—“Appearance is only skin deep.” “You can’t tell a book by its cover.”

Cusk gives these generalities a life, she takes them out of the lab, and puts them in concrete situations, situations that we may find ourselves experiencing. By doing this, I think she makes them far more memorable, with much greater impact than reading about a research study of the same phenomena.

Knowing about the pitfalls of this bias does not prevent us from succumbing to it. But perhaps Cusk’s descriptions will keep us from falling prey to it as often as we usually do. It isn’t easy, except perhaps by learning to pause for a moment or two before you judge another person on the basis of some physical characteristic.

We also might spend far less time than we ordinarily do in judging other people in the first place.

Rachel Cusk's Outline Part 2

Dickens did it. Alexander Dumas did it. So did Henry James and Herman Melville. And now the English novelist, Rachel Cusk, is doing it. Cusk might be familiar to previous readers of this blog as I admire her work a great deal. Her latest venture is being published in the Paris Review, in each of the periodical’s issues this year.

Part 2 is the most recent in her forthcoming volume that is currently titled Outline. In the first installment, an English writer travels to Greece to teach a writing course. Seated next to her on the flight is an older Greek man who describes the failure of his two marriages and other family misfortunes. He invites her to take a boating excursion with him the next day.

Part 2 begins as they drive to a small boat harbor outside Athens. They continue their dialogue that, at times, is both amusing and stimulating. She swims far out to sea, all the while ruminating. I want only to comment here on a few of her ideas.

She notes that people can never change completely. Rather she believes whatever changes occur are latent, “had lain dormant, waiting to be evoked by circumstance.” I know well such an experience, although it is infrequent.

Once in a while I will meet a person and engage in the kind of conversation I’ve not had in years. It is quick, clever, witty, sometimes hilarious and usually leads nowhere. Only certain people in certain situations can evoke it. It is unpredictable, but when it happens it is worth the wait.

Cusk also comments at some length on a family she observes as she is swimming in the sea. They are gathered together on a boat. She sees how happy they are or seem to be. But then she knows that what she observes is probably not at all like they really are. When she looked at the family, what she saw was a commentary on her own life. She saw “a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there.”

In another language, this is the familiar actor-observer bias. The actors view the situation from their own experience, while those who observe it, see it from their own. The two can be widely divergent. Similarly, when explaining their own behavior, a person is likely attribute it to external events, while attributing other people’s behavior to personal or internal events.

She remembers a scene in Wuthering Heights. “Looking through the window, the two of them see different things. Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she feels and desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they are.”

In the evening, after their boating trip, they meet for dinner in Athens with another writer. The talk is lively, serious, interesting. They talk about the meaning of the self, a person’s identity. And Cusk comments to my delight: “I thought the whole idea of a “real” self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self with you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.” Yes, I exclaimed as I was reading along, I have always believed this was the case.

I am enjoying her story immensely. We are in Greece, in the summer, it is warm, very much so, and the dialogue is pure philosophy. What is next? A visit to an island in the Aegean? A trek up the Acropolis to the Parthenon? A discussion of Plato’s view of poets in the Republic? I will have to wait, although I’d rather not.

Motherhood is Hell

“If everyone would read this book, the propagation of the human race would virtually cease…”

In last week’s Times Magazine (9/12/10) Lisa Belkin asks, “Is child-rearing the new self-actualization?” Her question stems from a recent article by the evolutionary psychologist David Kendrick that redefined Abraham Maslow’s original theory of self-actualization in terms of “attracting a mate and ultimately, parenting children.”

Rachel Cusk, the well known and much admired by this reader English writer, would surely object, and do so strongly, to this dubious claim. Cusk is the mother of two children and has recently written about her experience of motherhood in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.

The book is a bold expression, a powerful one that angered many readers for its brutally honest account of motherhood. The nearly unanimous outcry after it was published confused Cusk for, as she commented, “I was only being honest.”

Cusk is not the first writer to write critically about the experience of motherhood. But she may be the first to describe its adversities with such vitality and intensity--a domestic struggle, confinement, sleeplessness, confusion, guilt mixed with love, servitude mixed with compassion, a prison, boot-camp, never ending torment.

‘Motherhood, for me, was a sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world. I was forever plotting my escape from it, when I found myself pregnant again when Albertine was six months old, I greeted my old cell with the cheerless acceptance of a convict intercepted at large.”

In A Life’s Work, Cusk has tried to convey what she thought and felt about the experience of having a child. Although she might now regret publishing the book, she must have hoped that other people would identify with her account and know that they were not the only ones to react the way she did.

For Cusk caring for her child was “isolating, frequently boring, relentless, demanding and exhausting. It erodes your self-esteem and your membership in the adult world.”

Throughout the book she draws upon works of literary fiction to corroborate her experiences. She cites Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth and asks what a woman is if she is not a mother or a wife either.

“The baby is the symbol not just of Lily’s exclusion from the human life-cycle, nor of the vulnerability, the helplessness that marks her life and her life’s end: it is also the vision of her squandered femininity…”

And in a separate chapter on Madame Bovary, she reflects on how confusing it is for a mother to make sense of being “supremely powerful and powerless at the same time.”

Her relationship with her husband comes under pressure. “…after a child is born the lives of its mother and father diverge, so that where before they were living in a state of some equality, now they exist in a sort of feudal relation with each other.” Clearly news about the how closely fathers are now involved in child rearing had yet to arrive in the British Isles.

And yet they were in this “crime” together. “When evening comes, I prepare the bottle. Her father is to give it to her, for we are advised that this treachery is best committed not by the traitor herself but by a hired assassin.”

I have always found much to admire in the works of Rachel Cusk. And while I will never be a mother, I heard clearly what she was saying in this book. At one point she speaks of “…the death of freedom, its untimely murder by the state of parenthood…” Note: parenthood, not motherhood.

And later “…the hardship of parenthood is so unrelievedly shock….At its worst moments parenthood does indeed resemble hell, in the sense that its torments are never ending.”

OK, you get the picture. While very few parents are likely to admit they experience anything close to this degree of hardship in raising their children, I think there is enough truth in Cusk’s account will be familiar to anyone who has ever been a parent.

An Italian Summer

Like so many English writers (Keats, Lawrence, Byron, etc) who longed for warmer climes, Rachel Cusk took flight from England recently for a three-month sojourn in Italy. She writes about her experience in The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy. She left with her two daughters, age five and six, and photographer husband from Bristol where she had grown increasingly dissatisfied with its noise, grime, malls, traffic and general ugliness.

“I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty, why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why our race should have fallen so totally out of sympathy with the earth.”

She says her friends were sorry to see her depart but that they did not believe we would find a place in Italy that we liked better, for it seemed to them “that we were afflicted with restlessness and with a love of the unknown that in their eyes was a kind of curse, like the curses in mythology that are forever sending people from their homes to seek what perhaps can never be found…”

The Last Supper is as dazzling and absorbing as everything else I’ve read by Cusk. The casa colonia in the province of Arezzo, where she settles for the longest period, is captured with all the beauty and sadness of Italian life. She befriends a Scottish emigrant who in turn introduces her to local residents and arranges activities for her family in and around the local villages. She proceeds to learn Italian and study in depth the paintings of its artists, as well as the “art in daily things.” She writes most provocatively about this aspect of Italian culture.

“Reading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, one begins to notice a minor consistency of an unexpected sort. The artists of the Renaissance, almost without exception, profited early in life from their fathers’ help in the recognition and exercise of their talents.”

And she reminds those of us who find it difficult to fully appreciate the art of that period that, “There must be an offering of the self before the painting will open.”

For Cusk the art of the Renaissance reminds her how physically ugly the world has become. She looks at a Perugino, “in order to digest the supermarkets and shopping malls, the litter and landfill sites, the pylons and traffic jams and motorway service stations that otherwise fill the eye.”

One wonders how she was able to get her daughters to visit all those Italian museums and churches to say nothing of making any sense of it. Throughout her account, however, we scarcely hear a word about them or, indeed, her husband other than the fact that he joins her in tennis matches in the hot, blazing mid-day sun. How she manages to play tennis at that time of day also puzzles me.

She concludes her observation of art by saying its real glory is the art of survival. "That which is human decays and disappears: only in art does the quality of humanity favor survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant that the next instant doesn’t erase."

I believe it was its art that she loved most about her three months in Italy. Not the beauty of the countryside or the joyful Italian personality, or their lifestyle, or its literature and surely not its tennis games, but rather the beauty of its art. She realizes that living there would really involve the same things as living anywhere.

“There would be all the ripples of effect that are sent out when people establish themselves among other people….To live in another country requires a fundamental acceptance of things that are true in all countries.”

She remarks that Lawrence lived everywhere until he grew to hate the place whereupon he moved on, never finding peace anywhere. I recall a passage from Horace: “We change our skies but not our souls.”

Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park

Even though the story is about five women living in a suburb outside London, Rachel Cusk’s novel, Arlington Park, is also the story of my own life, the life of one man who had lived most of his life more than 5,000 miles away in the urban center of Portland, Oregon.

First there was the weather, the weather that matched in every way the mood of the town I had lived in for so long. All you had to do was look outside to glimpse the scene Cusk was describing in Arlington Park, the suburb depicted in her novel.

The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky.

It was so grey, so grey and unavailing! It was like sorrow: it seemed to preclude every possibility, every other shade of feeling.

In the hall she took their wet coats and bags and umbrellas. They prised their water stained shoes, muddy, perilously garnished with soaked leaves, from their feet. It was messy work, the unending struggle to maintain separation between outside and in.

Eventually, to be more exact, forty years after I arrived, I left that town that I never felt comfortable calling my home. None of the women in Cusk’s novel leave their home nor, given their age and the age of the children, are they likely to do so in the foreseeable future.

Then there is the tedious, deadly feeling that sweeps over one living day after day in the suburbs. Cusk beautifully describes this mood, a mood that is not uncommon to me or most anyone, I think, regardless of where they live.

How are you, Christine said, and Juliet nearly replied, Actually, I’m dead. I was murdered a few years ago, nearly four years ago to be exact.

…air of empty seclusion was complete.

It was a mysterious place, Arlington Park: it was a suburb, a sort of enormous village really, yet even here the force of life came up strong, dealing out its hard facts, its irrepressible, universal dimension.…It was civilization, and yet to Juliet it seemed uncivilized to the core. It lacked art: worse, it lacked any conception of justice. It was just getting and having—look at them all, backed up in their cars all the way to the park, jostling, fighting get and to have.

Each of the women express their malaise somewhat differently. It was Juliet’s that interested me most, perhaps because of the solace she sometimes found in literature.

Never, never did she feel in life the sense of recognition, the companionship, the great warm fact of solidarity that she found between the covers of a book.

She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.

But even that was not enough:

You realize you’re waiting for something, Juliet said, that’s never going to happen. Half the time you don’t even know what it is. You’re waiting for the next stage. Then in the end you realize that there isn’t a next stage. That is all there is.

Most of the women tried to confront the emptiness of their days with the customary experiences of modern life—home, marriage, children, shopping. Cusk makes it clear that none of these can do the job either.

Her car was her true companion: it was clean and spacious and mechanically discreet, and it did her bidding powerfully, efficiently, and with silent approval of her style of command. When she was in her car she had a feeling of infinite passage.

What an enormous kitchen! cried Sally Gibson, following Christine and Dinky in. In that moment Amanda knew that her kitchen was too large. She would not have thought such a thing was possible, but entering it now she knew that it was true. They had knocked through until they had created not space but emptiness. They had gone too far: nobody had told them to stop.

The room, the house, even Arlington Park itself increasingly wore for her the lineaments of a lived past into which future possibilities were unable to intrude; of a fundamental sadness that was the unalterable relic of experience.

How did Cusk manage to describe so accurately the situation that many people find themselves in today? Did it spring from the conditions of her own life? Who can ever know such things? What does it matter? She has got it just right. I know the weather, the boredom that can just as readily occur in the heart of the city as the suburbs, and the despair that sometimes descends upon one. Each experience comes and goes. There are some days where the weather is bearable, where something brings you alive, and where that elemental melancholy momentarily disappears. And then the winter begins again.