The narratorial absence is part of what compels one through the novels, for it acts like a filter, distilling all other people’s tales down to their most philosophically bare, their most ethically ambiguous, their most painfully isolated. Whenever the story threatens to reveal too much about Faye (as in the last book of the series, Kudos), the plot cuts short, so that our vision of the narrator is primarily based on what others say to her this “annihilated perspective” renders her nearly immaterial, an entity composed entirely of style. What thread these encounters together are not the characters, who rarely recur, but the themes that emerge like a color palette. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue.” Rachel Cusk’s new novel, The Second Place, is its own kind of Diebenkorn, for its meaning comes from the conversations that happen not just between the characters, but also between concepts-painting and writing, lightness and darkness, art and life.Ĭonversation is not a new preoccupation for Cusk, whose most recent and critically acclaimed work, her Outline trilogy, is constructed from exchanges between the narrator, Faye, and the people around her. The painter Richard Diebenkorn once described his process: “I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something.

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