![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In the debate over Creative Writing 101′s maxim, “show, don’t tell,” Cusk is among the most accomplished practitioners of “tell.”Īlthough less even in execution than the trilogy, her new novel, “ Second Place,” draws on her evergreen preoccupations - the shadow of divorce, the binary of women and men, the chains of art and attraction - in a pandemic-tinged fable addressed to an off-stage character. Cusk’s recent Outline trilogy is a Didion-like achievement, so poised and philosophical that readers may miss the anguish and self-laceration beneath her limpid prose. If Ali Smith is the fiery, inventive moralist among our leading British writers and Hilary Mantel is the chronicler of sumptuous history and the contradictions of power, then Rachel Cusk is the coolly elegant cartographer of inner lives, given to restraint as Smith and Mantel are inclined to excess. ![]()
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