Rachel Cusk is a fine writer, but has had the misfortune to come to the public’s attention because of a supposedly too-frank work of family autobiography and because she upset an all-female book group in Bristol. The latter of these is such an obviously good thing that it hard not to like her by default. If writers can’t upset a bunch of middle of the road readers, then they’re not doing it right.
The Bradshaw Variations is a very self-consciously writerly book. This is both a benefit and a hindrance; Cusk’s prose is often very beautiful, and has the feeling of a very high degree of polish, but it can also feel terribly contrived. I think this comes from using language that is too highfalutin for its subject. The banalities of family life are described as though they are fit for the vaulted prose one might expect to describe an epic battle.
I’m not a huge fan of this kind of writing in any circumstances, and outside of Proust it barely functions at all. In fact, it often works to occlude meaning and to hinder readability. As a purely technical achievement it’s worthy of praise, but one wishes that Cusk came a bit closer to the essence of the things she is describing. It’s like peering at a painting through layer upon layer of yellowing varnish.
The characters in the novel are almost all distasteful. They’re the kind of people who would make you go postal if you spent too long sitting next to them in an Islington cafe (if you hadn’t turned the gun on yourself first). It’s all so relentlessly middle-class, so self-satisfied, so insufferably into itself. Cusk’s characters are so similar to each other, and speak with such unvarying voices, that it’s hard to keep track of which self-obsessed tosser she’s concentrating on when.
The central problem of the novel is that these people are extremely privileged, and it’s therefore very difficult to sympathise with their rather flimsy angst. They have wonderful homes, very few financial worries and good educations. They can spend their time pondering questions such as ‘What is art?”; indeed ‘What is art?’ is the unbearably pretentious opening line of the book. These are people who are difficult to feel pity for. Their troubles, such as they are, are piffling, except where they tip over into melodrama, and then they are merely silly.
Rachel Cusk is an interesting writer, but The Bradshaw Variations is a very difficult book to like.
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