As a student I remember being directed to chapter 42 of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, the brilliance of it being that ‘nothing happens’. Ever since I’ve regarded the ability to keep your reader hooked through a whole chapter in which nothing happens to be the acme of fictional achievement.

Rachel Cusk does it in a central chapter of Arlington Park, describing a day in the life of the park itself where everyone and everything — clouds, grass, people, dogs — are caught up in a relentless and seemingly meaningless dance. A young man holds on to the tugging strings of his kite ‘as if he were holding on to the world itself’, dog-owners throw sticks, joggers jog, and the mothers in the ‘fenced enclosure’ of the children’s playground see everything moving around them, ‘the whole mechanism of the world, running on, running like a machine... for them it was a form of agony to watch it.’

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