The Lucky Ones is Rachel Cusk’s fifth book. 

In it, there is a Contents page, which announces five sections.  Each section stands by itself.  There is a passing reference in each section to at least one character in another section.  With a lovely circularity, the last section ends with, I believe, the only reference to the main character in the first section.

A wonderful collection of linked stories.  But the book, on its cover, calls itself a novel.   Again, I don’t think so. 

Still, the author’s writing throughout is even better in this book than her last.  The final section of The Lucky Ones is my favorite.  In it, she goes into that depth of truthfulness that characterizes a work of substance.

“You’re doing well for yourself,” said Vanessa sourly.

“And all that happened,” mused Serena, “was that I finally worked out that people prefer what’s true to what’s right. 

She writes about shaping a day:  “It seemed to Vanessa that she should do something to please Colin on his return from work, and this ambition immediately rose like a great spire from the humble structure of the day.”

Finally, perhaps my favorite paragraph:

“It was in the mornings that Vanessa most often suspected the existence of a problem.  In the rumpled dawn camouflage of her bed she would open her eyes and think of the coming day and sometimes, just as when sometimes she turned the key in the ignition of her old Honda, nothing would happen.  She lay there, paralyzed by the image of what she had both to construct and then to dismantle before being returned to this same bed, like a book being returned to its shelf, intact and yet somehow depleted of her information.”

Rachel Cusk‘s fourth book is a memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.  My favorite line, because of the unwritten premise, comes in the Introduction, where she writes, “…so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood without explaining to some degree how I found the time to write it.” 

The answer is that her partner quit his job to take care of the children “while Rachel writes her book about looking after the children.”

In the author’s words, this book “describes a period in which time seemed to go round in circles rather than in any chronological order.”  Very quickly, the baby develops colic.  Surely, Cusk writes, there is a better word for this, some sort of German word meaning lifegrief. 

At the end of three months:  “I see that she has become somebody.  I realize, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself.  And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence.”

My only quarrel with the memoir is that perhaps a better title would have been simply On Becoming a Mother, as these pages are limited to the initial weeks and months after the baby is born, to this transition time of becoming a mother, which the author so clearly does. 

A book to read before you get pregnant, as well as afterwards (if you can stay awake long enough to read.)  And don’t forget Anne Lamott‘s, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year.  Two books that speak the truth.

If anyone is waiting for the house-building analogy, she’s painting and carpeting….Next up, The Lucky Ones.