Cusk’s Bitter Feminist Pill Not Worth Swallowing

One has to wonder after reading “Arlington Park” whether the author, Rachel Cusk, is a penetrating analyst of human psychology—or just an embittered feminist.

Whichever category Cusk falls into, her newest novel is certainly perceptive. It is a surprisingly philosophical book in which everyday characters in an everyday setting hint at being deeply symbolic—though it’s difficult to discern what they’re supposed to symbolize.

“Arlington Park” follows the lives of five young British housewives through the course of one rainy day and culminates, like “Mrs. Dalloway,” in a dinner party. Cusk’s heroines are the crème de la crème of suburban homemakers, capable women in their mid to late thirties who expertly stuff chicken breasts for dinner with one hand while keeping order among a host of rowdy toddlers with the other. All this, and yet they unfailingly find time to philosophize about topics ranging from moral responsibilities to the meaning of happiness and self-fulfillment. Talk about desperately hitting readers over the head with a hammer: This Is Not Chick Lit!

And, inevitably, the Stepford lives of these women are interlaced with deeper hidden issues—much like “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” and “Desperate Housewives,” though without the drugs and debauchery. Talented Juliet, who once dreamed of becoming a famous journalist or distinguished professor, refers to her husband as her “murderer.” Neat-freak Amanda can’t stand her children. Docile Maisie feels stifled within her husband’s household. Independent Christine hates the confinement of her house, and insecure Solly is unfulfilled by her family. See a trend?

The themes of “Arlington Park”—dreams and ambitions stripped away by domesticity, spirits and personalities quailed by marriage, energy suppressed and freedom thwarted by maternity—are trite contemporary fodder. But to give her credit, Cusk redeems these stale themes with exquisite language and is on aesthetic high ground, safe from criticism of low-brow unoriginality.

Cusk’s words are so lovely that they make the tongue itch; it’s hard to resist the temptation to read all 248 pages out loud. The lush descriptions of Arlington Park and its residents seem to enter the transcendent realm of poetry.

Unfortunately, eloquence does not in itself make a book engaging, and Cusk is perhaps a little too aware of her literary prowess. An otherwise minor descriptive line will stretch out into a paragraph, a paragraph into a page, a page into a chapter, and so on, with the end result that “Arlington Park” resembles a hardy green woolen scarf whose orderly knit rows are interrupted by splotches of purple silk­—beautiful, but entirely out of place.

Cusk’s poignant and intuitive portrayal of the frustrations of being a young housewife and her ability to evoke understanding and sympathy for her characters is amazing, yet therein lies the greatest problem: “Arlington Park” is too saturated with the miseries of domestic life. It is unrealistic that every mom in a casual group that meets outside the school gates is wildly unhappy with her life as wife and mother. In spite of their (slightly) different situations, the characters are not distinctive; they fade together into a single embodiment of the same frustrations.

There are no redeeming qualities to married life, at least as Cusk portrays it in her novel. The children are, if not an additional curse, no compensation. There are no light scenes in which to draw breath and recover from the blows that Cusk delivers. Even the passages describing the town are clouded by a grey fog and rain that reminds readers of the wretchedness of home and suburbia.

“Arlington Park” is a book without hope. Not only do Cusk’s characters suffer, but they make no efforts to change or improve their situations. Cusk offers harsh discouragement to every member of her audience: children, you are nasty little terrors who make your mothers’ lives miserable; husbands, you are irresponsible and selfish ogres who enslave your wives and smother their souls; wives and mothers, you are the wretched of the earth, condemned to a pathetic and pitiable existence.

“Arlington Park” is an unbalanced novel that lacks the small moments of comic relief necessary for a really good read. As gorgeous as Cusk’s writing is, it rarely expresses more than bitterness.

—Reviewer April B. Wang can be reached at abwang@fas.harvard.edu.