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A review by annegreen
The Temporary by Rachel Cusk
2.0
This is Rachel Cusk's second novel. I haven't yet read her first but having read a few of her latest and been impressed by them, this one is clearly a very low step on the ladder of her novelistic trajectory. I'm not sure why I kept ploughing on with it, maybe in the (unrealised) hopes it would redeem itself. Her early work has been likened to Henry James, among others, and insofar as the prose is convoluted, overwrought and meandering, it is. But we don't expect Henry James in 1995 (the year of its publication). Apart from being overwritten, its weighed down to the point of torpidity by cumbersome metaphors that mostly don't work. Perhaps she hadn't been long out of a creative writing learning environment where she was told lots of metaphors make the writing more vivid. And they do, but used judiciously and with moderation. Here they leap out shouting "look at me" from almost every paragraph. As an example:
"He had done wrong, a terrible, intractable wrong reached by a steep stairway of mistakes and failures, from whose top he could view all the things he should have done and realise only how far he was from them. His helplessness could not absolve him: he had failed to defend what was his as it floated alone in its troubled sea, had abandoned where he should have protected, had cast away his fragile creation and left it to cower at the drip of wine-toxic blood, the rooting jabs of a stranger, the unfriendly air in which he himself was betrayed and reviled."
The characters are horrors - all of them. Pretentious, self-absorbed, vacillating, vacuous and wildly irritating.
We can only be thankful she's improved beyond bounds since this one.
"He had done wrong, a terrible, intractable wrong reached by a steep stairway of mistakes and failures, from whose top he could view all the things he should have done and realise only how far he was from them. His helplessness could not absolve him: he had failed to defend what was his as it floated alone in its troubled sea, had abandoned where he should have protected, had cast away his fragile creation and left it to cower at the drip of wine-toxic blood, the rooting jabs of a stranger, the unfriendly air in which he himself was betrayed and reviled."
The characters are horrors - all of them. Pretentious, self-absorbed, vacillating, vacuous and wildly irritating.
We can only be thankful she's improved beyond bounds since this one.