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A review by annegreen
The Lucky Ones by Rachel Cusk
4.0
This book is billed as a novel but it's actually five separate stories, linked nebulously by two or three characters. There’s a passage in it spoken by one of the characters who appear consistently (albeit often briefly) in each of the stories. This is Serena, a young woman ostensibly successfully combining career (journalism) and motherhood. She writes a regular column for a national newspaper based on her own family experiences and those of other women she knows. She says, when asked what it is she does - “I’m trying to write about feminism in the context of the family. About how inequality runs through the veins of how we live together and love and reproduce.”
This appears to be Cusk’s overarching theme – the conflicts, struggles and violent contradictions inherent in being a parent and a spouse. Interestingly this book was written a year after her controversial autobiographical account of her own experiences of parenting –
‘’A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother”. Neither book presents a particularly optimistic view of motherhood.
In this book there is no character who’s found a way of rationalising their hopes, dreams and aspirations as individuals with the responsibilities and obligations that come with marriage and children. They’re all struggling in various ways, but then if they weren’t there wouldn’t be a basis for a book. Cover to cover versions of happy families might be too saccharine, as well as unrealistic. And Cusk is not an author to embrace anything but gritty realism overlaid with a consistent bleakness that in her skilled hands seems somehow just the way it should be.
It’s the prose and the spare but authentic dialogue that makes the reading of this book far more rewarding than its subject suggests.
This appears to be Cusk’s overarching theme – the conflicts, struggles and violent contradictions inherent in being a parent and a spouse. Interestingly this book was written a year after her controversial autobiographical account of her own experiences of parenting –
‘’A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother”. Neither book presents a particularly optimistic view of motherhood.
In this book there is no character who’s found a way of rationalising their hopes, dreams and aspirations as individuals with the responsibilities and obligations that come with marriage and children. They’re all struggling in various ways, but then if they weren’t there wouldn’t be a basis for a book. Cover to cover versions of happy families might be too saccharine, as well as unrealistic. And Cusk is not an author to embrace anything but gritty realism overlaid with a consistent bleakness that in her skilled hands seems somehow just the way it should be.
It’s the prose and the spare but authentic dialogue that makes the reading of this book far more rewarding than its subject suggests.