Rachel Cusk has a profound ability to create a synergy of sensations. In the same way a head may turn when mistaking the ring on the TV as one's own telephone, so Rachel Cusk's magical prose has one listening to the (non-existent) rain and sniffing the air for the lingering smell of the school lunch down the corridors: 'the rich odour of reheated food suffused the building and hung in a meat-smelling shape around the doors' (p.158). In capturing these elements, evoking non-specific times and places, Arlington Park is set in some wayward eternity yet is seemingly now (there is one reference to a mobile phone) though its characterization of what we may call the 'housewives-predicament' makes Arlington Park linger non-delicately somewhere between the 1950's and '70s or perhaps even earlier.

In two parts, Arlington Park is not a novel so much as a set of short stories culminating in a dinner party where we are joined by some (but not all) of those characters previously met. Not that it matters. For Arlington Park is really about one person manifested in several different ways, re-created by wearing a different top or placed in a different kitchen. Even the same person may appear differently to others: Juliet is 'shaven-headed like a nun' (p.163) according to the school children but with a nice 'bobbed hair' by a fellow housewife (p.232) Though nuances in personality suggest differing emotions: fear of change or death, humiliation and anger, it is the overriding theme of self-righteous bitterness that underpins Arlington Park. Though it aims to offer a phenomenology of the suburbs — Arlington Park is the eponymous suburb in question — this is not a book about people or lives but about the life of woman in the singular — a particular type of woman: middle class, college educated, married in her thirties, with young children. Sometimes she is pregnant, or pushing her toddler in his buggy in the park but always she is bitter, as if — as woman — she has not freely chosen this life, this husband, this home.

And therein lies the problem.

Who are the women in Arlington Park? Who is she who's harshness bites through the pages like a rabid dog? She may hold a good, decent job – school teacher, TV producer; and even be educated to PhD level. But the world of work does not exist; there is only identity as wife and mother and home maker; there is, then, only some past pre-feminist nail biting dependent woman who has abandoned her career, her life in London (the big city) for the non-thrill of children and hubbie — who, when we meet him is white, middle class and bemoans 'the end of the English' (p.226) Who is he? He is the stereotyped man who fails to pull his weight: 'She … would describe his children to him, as though he had never met them before … of which he might eventually be persuaded to make a considered purchase.' (p.176)

It is somewhat disingenuous for Jenny with her 'PhD, her air of bitterness' to therefore complain 'she was an outsider' (p. 38) when the only difference between her and Solly or Amanda or Christine is a communication gap where each woman fails to recognize her peer as similarly morphed in a world of desperate non-identity. In Arlington Park the world turns around coffee mornings, interior decorating, the frustration of children. There is no political thought, no philosophy or history or poverty, let alone a war on terror. And here lies the novel's main weakness. As phenomenology, there is unarguably beauty in the detail of the mundane but in redeeming her women as suburban muse Cusk never allows her characters to admit they have freely chosen this world. In the woman's failure to be a true person, one imagines that at any moment Jenny or Amanda would happily step outside the book to preach to the single woman of the wonders of motherhood, to tell her she is missing out, or selfish or perhaps merely sad. Yet it is Cusk's characters who come across as the saddest of all. 'What would they do with their bodies that felt so stiff and clumsy, now that the future had rehoused itself in children clad in red yellow and blue?' (p.150)

Arlington Park should be required reading for anyone contemplating a move to the suburbs or indeed, planning a pregnancy. The city and the single life have never looked so appealing.

© 2007 Eccy de Jonge

Eccy de Jonge is the author of Spinoza and Deep Ecology, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

Categories: Fiction