Arlington Park - What a great big pile of crap, worst book I have had the misfortune to pick up in a long long time

mrsgaskell: I just felt she laid it on too thick. I know it's not an A-level essay and therefore has no duty to provide a balanced viewpoint but it just really wound me up that the characters in the book that might have worked through that ambivalence and begun to rediscover themselves, even felt fulfilled by motherhood, were not allowed to speak.

Solly was really the nail in the coffin. If you haven't come to terms with the evolution of your identity by your fourth baby...

To go back to an earlier post of yours: I didn't feel RC felt ambivalence towards these women; I felt she actively despised them for having small lives and for "allowing" motherhood to affect their identities. And I get quite tribal about mothers being attacked for being mothers. (Even fictional ones.)

The best thing I can say about Rachel Cusk is that she has earnt me £10 on more than one occassion thanks submitting her tripe to Pseud's Corner in Private Eye.

BOOK SHIT

no rowing

I'm afraid even though she is a good prose stylist RC's work is far too misanthropic for me. You can admire it but not enjoy it, at least I can't. I used to know her a bit and found her incredibly precious and smug, oozing superiority. Despite personal dislike I'd like to like her books because any good fiction about contemporary women is always welcome but there's just a total lack of generosity at the core of it all. Any really great artist will acknowledge what is uplifting about humanity, as well as what is depressing.

Its a boring book.
I stick with American authors mainly - miles better.

Hi Flossie. It's not dead at all, just in need of fresh input like yours.

I think your account of the novel is accurate. I guess for me it's a pretty appealing pitch as it describes most women's experiences - that having children seems to derail their lives more than their partners, that they let go alot of the things that defined their youth. Would you really be able to disagree with this statement? And yes, as a consequence, their children have come to represent something quite dark and dangerous to them. You are lucky that you feel able to express the ambivalence you felt about your own experiences of early motherhood. Perhaps the women in Arlington Park feel trapped by their surrounds and unable to tell the truth about their feelings. Didn't you relate to Solly's envy of her lodgers and their apparent freedom as she approached the birth of her fourth child?

PS I read the business about the rain - at least the opening passage - as a conscious imitation of - sorry, clever reference to - the passage about the snow falling general over Ireland in James Joyce's The Dead. Jimmy did it better.

Right, I know this thread should officially be dead but I just finished Arlington Park on the train and it made me SO CROSS I couldn't not add something.... sorry.

I really loved A Life's Work. It captured for me the real ambivalence that first-time mums can feel (OK, I felt). And I also really enjoyed The Lucky Ones.

All the women seem to be unrelentingly miserable. They all feel unfulfilled. None of them takes any joy, pleasure or sense of fulfilment from having produced children. (Apart from possibly the lovely, "calm", Stephanie, but we aren't allowed a chapter from her perspective so we'll never know.)

Their jobs, if they have them, are all sidelined - either given up with marriage or kids, or reduced to part-time, and definitely nothing like as important or valuable as their husbands. Everyone is fat/plump/round, white/pasty/pale. All the husbands are bigots. The children are all described as if the fact that they produce e.g. snot, mess, mud is utterly revolting and horrifying.

I felt reading this as if that nasty article RC wrote about her book club had boiled over and this was a novel-length revenge on suburbia.

I have given it 2 stars on iRead. I think I'm going to read a couple of crime thrillers next.

No, but I can send them to my editor who will publish them.

Well, you won't have heard of them, will you?

I'm so curious about these deserving books that should be published. If another novel was never published, we'd have enough books in print to take care of all of our reading needs. Go on, tell me about three books that should be published that aren't. Oh, and by the way, I'm a hugely successful novelist.

We probably could do with fewer books. But there are a lot of books out there which deserve to be published which are not being, and a lot of books which have been published - e.g. swathes of "celeb"-led stuff and misery memoirs - which we could well do without.

And as a quite-successful published writer I can say that as a pure observation, without any personal bitterness.

mrsgaskell - I don't quite get what your problem is. I'd be interested to know if anyone else thinks I am "cagey", or that I "spunk" (interesting choice of word ) any more words than anyone else round here. (And nowhere have I said that I personally only write "after hours". It's just a situation a lot of people are in.)

Whoops - I meant one woman's experience.

'The Temporary' is good - it's about another repulsive antiheroine, and the tedium of office life is amusingly described too. She wrote it years ago, but it probably prepared me for the likes of Arlington Park.

mrsgaskell!

I'm always ed at the amount of vitriol Rachel Cusk evokes. I thought A Life's Work was just one side of things - ones woman's experience. I didn't read it as a 'how-to' manual, more as a memoir, a biography - which was what it was intended to be. Love wasn't mentioned much, which was a shame, but it was still interesting.

I've liked Rachel's writing for years and totally 'got' the antiheroines in Arlington Park. You have to view it with a dystopian, almost sci-fi head on really, and I thought it was an interesting and disquieting study of a certain type of woman. A bit Fay Weldon fantasy-ish.

I saw her at a literary festival recently and she was friendly and gregarious, not standoffish at all, although I'll concede that this may have been a one-off. I was impressed with how at ease she was in everyone's company.

The difference is, we need electricians, plumbers and bricklayers. The truth is, there are more mediocre writers writing books than are required. We could happily live with a tenth of the output of British publishing - agreed? There is an economic reality to writing. If 2000 people show up and pay eight quid a go for a book and you're on a ten percent royalty, do you think you should be paid beyond that real value? Are publishers actually funding bodies? I don't think so.

On another note, you aren't anonymous are you, because I could email and find out who you are.

But my bigger question is, if you can only write in these precious hours, after work and after the children are in bed, why on earth do you spunk so many words on a message board?

And I think a lot of people would take issue with the implication that women "need childcare" in order to write, whereas of course men don't.

mrs g - in what way am I "weird and cagey" about it? I protect my anonymity no more assiduously than anybody else on here. I talk (and moan) about my job no more than anyone else on here. But surely you see that if I were to, for example, post a link to my website on here (which I could easily do) I'd lose the anonymity which so many people on here value. I'm a bit about the implication that I'm not entitled to mine.

lulu - you have the wrong end of the stick, really. You say you can't imagine there are many writers out there "doing it for the money". My emphasis is that there are an awful lot of writers out there, but not many managing to do it as a career. There are loads of how-to books telling you how to start off, but almost nothing telling you how to sustain it. Why should writers be any less entitled than anyone else to try and make a long-term go of it? The expectation that professional writers should be happy to earn little - and even work for nothing, which I have often been requested to do - is one which would not be tolerated by electricians, plumbers or bricklayers.

Thanks lulu. Have you paid money to find out who that guy really is?

"This is because writing pays a pittance. "

Well, stop writing then, if it's so bloody awful!

Look, either do it for the love of it, or don't bother. Unless one writes computer manuals or Mills&Boon I can't imagine there are many writers out there doing it for the money. Getting lucky with the royalties & the movie deals is just that, in most cases - being in the right place at the right time, with the right zeitgeist (as Harry Potter proves).

If the problem is feeling that publishers are taking writers for a ride, get a better agent and negotiate harder!

MrsGaskell, I liked your critique.

Sorry. I'm going to rephrase that. 'How is a woman supposed to write unless she has childcare?'

How published are you anyway? And why are you so weird and cagey about it?