Scotland on Sunday
9 August 2009
‘What’s a man doing, hanging around the house?” Thomas Bradshaw has decided to be a househusband, and look after his eight-year-old daughter after his wife Tonie gets a promotion. His mother-in-law, never one to mince her words, can’t get her head around it though. “A lot of those marriages end in divorce,” she goes on. “A man isn’t a man if he’s in the house all day”.
What seems like a disastrous, marriage-dooming decision for the Bradshaws is the springboard for Rachel Cusk’s latest novel; a look at suburban domesticity, and what happens when it is disturbed by a shake-up of routines. A stay-at-home dad is a long way from revolutionary, especially in the current job market, but is seems a good starting point for Cusk, who is most at home when she is in other people’s homes, letting herself in an unlocked back door, or an open garden gate for a peek at how the middle classes live.
The Los Angeles-raised, Oxford-educated novelist has examined family life several times before, in A Life’s Work: On Becoming A Mother and The Lucky Ones, which both studied the effects of being a parent. The Bradshaw Variations takes the same storytelling approach as her 2006 novel, Arlington Park, where different characters take turns to narrate the story, giving a 360 degree view of the action. Here, for added depth, the story is told by three generations, on two sides of the family.
Tonie and Thomas are at the centre of it all. Tonie has just been made head of the English department at the university where she used to lecture part-time, and is adjusting to the shift from doting mother to a commuting, power dressing, career woman.
Thomas meanwhile, has resigned from his job. He waits in the kitchen in the mornings, “as the platform guard waits for the London train to come through”. His wife passes in a blur of black tailoring, gathering paperwork and coffee before speeding out the door. “Like the train she stops, disgorging activity, and then departs again. It is a matter of minutes but he needs to be ready.”
Cusk’s strength is her grasp of the subtleties of relationships. The childish, churlish squabbles of Thomas’s parents, who will resort to an emotional tug-of-war over something as stupid as a missed cup of tea; or the nervous dependency of Thomas’s brother, Leo, who only feels comfortable when he is having verbal prompts whispered in his ear by his alcoholic wife, Susie. Cusk shows endless flair for magnifying the telltale minutiae of day-to-day life and showing what glues families together. Her weakness, on the other hand, is a tendency to detour away from her elegant, intelligent writing with obtuse ponderings and pseudo-philosophical musings. “Who is she?” Tonie wonders on a business trip to Amsterdam, as she sits in a trendy, minimalist hotel room. “What is she doing here in this room?… What physical event will justify this form and bring it into knowledge?” A few pages later, Thomas is clearing out some boxes, and continuing his ongoing search for creative authenticity, which began with him learning to play classical piano. “What is art?” he asks himself, as he clears out old instruction manuals from a cupboard.
When an author is so good at showing her characters, it seems clumsy and superfluous to then spend long passages also telling her reader what they are doing. What is far more successful is when she takes one of her solid, cliché-free characters and observes them going about the business of mowing a lawn, or playing the social butterfly at a drinks event, without signposting what the reader should be picking up. These detours are few and far between though, and easy to overlook in Cusk’s otherwise fluid, sometimes darkly funny writing style. Maybe it takes someone born in Canada to really pick up on the idiosyncrasies of middle class Britain, where Polish lodgers rifle through their hosts’ underwear drawers on the sly, and cravat-wearing toffs bicker with their welly-wearing wives. By dropping a man into what Philip Larkin once called “the hollows of afternoons”, and chaining the father to the sink instead, Cusk flips the notion of the unfulfilled, bored mother on its head, and delivers a thought-provoking, rich and powerful study of family life.
Rachel Cusk is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 31 August, 10.15am
Faber, £10.99