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

[Oliveoil]

One of my NY resolutions is to read more books (now that dd2 seems to realise - at 3.6yrs!!! - that at bedtime she REMAINS in her bed in the evening) and I have been doing just that

well

Arlington Park

I forced myself to get to the end

what an obnoxious moaning bunch of women

I do not know ANYBODY like this, it makes out motherhood and relationships to be crap

yes you may have the odd day when you could easily headbutt the wall, but purlease

hated the writing style and skimmed it over and over again

anybody want it FFP? before I lob it out of the window?

'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.

Whoops - I meant one woman's experience.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

ha, forgot about this thread

mrsgaskell - thank you for being so condescending in your recommendation of the Richard and Judy book list

book is still crap imo

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

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.

BOOK SHIT

no rowing

harrumph

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.

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.)