The ‘fenced enclosure’ sums up the condition of the five 30-plus women whose lives, trapped in the prosperous but deadly suburb of Arlington Park, Cusk investigates. Juliet, an English teacher, regards herself as ‘murdered’ by marriage and motherhood. Amanda’s life since moving to Arlington Park has begun to feel colourless.
Solly, pregnant with a fourth child and faced with a glamorous Italian lodger, sees herself as ‘a woman who has spent her life until there was none left’. Maisie, feeling ‘imprisoned’, tells her children they’ve ruined her life and at 38 blames her parents for everything from her own angry discontent to ‘the melting snows of Kilimanjaro’.
The character of Christine, distantly and detatchedly aware of the world’s problems but lost in the littleness of her own life, perhaps epitomises Arlington Park itself. Christine sums it up when she says, ‘It’s all been coffee here and lunch there and tearing around to drop off one child and pick up another and solving the world’s problems in between, and then suddenly I’m stuffing chicken breasts for eight.’ For Christine it doesn’t pay to think too much or worry too much and, although she does both, nothing really touches her. A thread in the novel is about a child abducted from the park. All Christine can say when she hears the girl has been found dead is, ‘Oh well.’
There’s little actual story to Arlington Park — a coffee morning, a visit to a shopping mall (‘purgatory’) and Christine’s final dinner-party. In its interweaving of voices the novel takes on a fugal quality. Cusk’s concern is with the inner life of her characters. The depth of this, plus the tightly controlled structure and brilliant dialogue, make this, her sixth novel, an impressive if miserable read.
The dinner-party and the fact that the action (such as it is) takes place in one rainy day give the novel an echo of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway while the sharpness of Cusk’s observation and insight reminds one of Muriel Spark.
Splendid writing, then, but somehow as joyless and loveless as the lives of these five women whose children one pities. Fiction has always been concerned with how to live; Cusk seems preoccupied not only with the how but the where. Her previous novel, In the Fold, examined life in the far from idyllic country. Life in the suburb of Arlington Park is a comfortable limbo where you lose all heart. Where next?
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