The Country Life, published in 1997, is Rachel Cusk‘s third novel.  She is spacing them out like children–one every two years.  As opposed to The Temporary, the writing is solid throughout, continuously propelling the reader forward.  The first sentence tells you that the narrator is supposed to take the four o’clock train from Charing Cross to Buckley.  The author then does a very good job of keeping you reading by supplying all sorts of details regarding the departure (although I wanted even more) without stating what Stella, the protagonist, will be doing when she arrives at this new destination or what specifically has caused her to make the journey.

Stella is an intriguing character from the first page.  Late in the novel, she says, “I don’t know what love means.  If it’s just a feeling, then it can stop.  I don’t see the point of trying so hard to preserve it.”

The Country Life was a delightful book to read.  To continue with the house-building metaphor (which perhaps should be dropped, but I tend to like to finish things I start), Rachel Cusk, in her writing life, is past the foundation and the framing, and into the sheet rock.

My three favorite lines:

“We are all, in our journey through life, navigating towards some special, dreamed-of place.”

“In a larger house, a knock or ring is a plea for entrance; in a small place such as my own, it is a demand.”

“…I turned off the light, closed my eyes, and forced myself, as one would force the head of a man beneath water to drown him, into sleep.”

I’ve just started her fourth book, which is a memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.

With her first novel, Saving Agnes, Rachel Cusk laid the foundation for her writing life.  The Temporary is her second novel.  It was published in 1995, two years after her first.  And I see improvement.  The author is using fewer words, and in places, she goes deep.  Overall, though, the writing is uneven.  Here are some highlights:

Waking, Ralph thought, “The hands pointing at one o’clock seemed so impossible, so wild in their assertion that a great swath of time had gone by without his supervision…”

“the terrible membrane of silence”

“He groped for a date and remembered then that it was still only February.  The year stretched before him in all its unavoidable detail, the hundreds of days and thousands of hours which he would endure as if something more lay at their end than mere repetition.  He wished that he could be tricked, as others seemed to be, by the close of each week, seeing in their false endings the immience of some sort of conclusion, like a soap opera.  He wondered why he had never fallen into step with this pattern of days, comprehended in the helpful clarity of a week’s tiny eras–birth, growth, productivity, decline, dormancy, regeneration, played out beneath the celestial presence of longer phases of weather–a system that might ease the slow construction of his life.”

I have sixty pages left in her next novel.  I might finish it tonight.