And even worse, he treats M dismissively. Instead, L turns up with a gorgeous young woman who makes her feel old and unattractive. When he accepts, she expects something transcendent to happen. In hopes of changing that, she offers up their rustic guesthouse to a famous painter called L, a child of the working class, whose art she found life-changing in Paris many years ago. Although their life seems happy, M keeps stewing over her sense that she's somehow insubstantial, invisible even to herself. The narrator, M, is a willful, sharp-eyed, not especially likeable writer whose strapping second husband Tony is a mensch who looks after their property. Loosely inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan's memoir of hosting Lawrence in Taos, N.M., in the 1920s, 'Second Place' tells a layered tale that, in its heightened fervor, feels as humid and murky as its marshy seaside setting. Where those crystalline novels were largely plotless and had the chilly burn of dry ice, this fascinating book finds her moving in a messier new direction. This quest still makes him a lodestar for many of today's writers, ranging from the sneaky-brilliant Geoff Dyer to fierce Rachel Cusk, who calls him her mentor.Ĭusk grapples with his spirit in 'Second Place,' her first novel since the Outline Trilogy, which is one of the great fictional achievements of the new millennium. At the same time, Lawrence was a genuine seeker, a genius obsessed with addressing big questions about the nature of the self, what it means to love and how to be authentic in the world. And his gender politics were, to put it generously, retrograde. JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: Of all the big British novelists of the 20th century, none is now less fashionable than D.H. Our critic at large John Powers says it's an enjoyably feverish tale about what we expect of art and artists. Her new novel, 'Second Place,' tells the story of a writer who invites a famous painter to stay at her guesthouse on the marshy coast of England.

The English novelist Rachel Cusk is best known here for her three books known as the Outline Trilogy.

Cusk second place