Faber £10.99 pp224

A certain strand of English fiction has long been enthralled by upper-class eccentricity and its paraphernalia: run-down country houses, careless sexual liaisons, brittle, tricky women who smoke small cigars. Michael, the narrator of Rachel Cusk’s fifth novel, is an inheritor of this romantic fixation with the decrepit posh. Michael experiences a single country-house weekend and, like Charles Ryder after Brideshead, he is never quite the same again.

Michael’s love affair with the bohemian upper classes begins at university, when his friend Adam Heywood invites him to a party at his family’s grandly dishevelled Devonshire farm. Michael — a man who declines to tell us his surname or his life story up to this point — has never been anywhere like it: he is mesmerised by Adam’s mother (vague and posh), his father (bellowing posh), and his sister Caris (barefoot hippy posh; a sort of 1980s Sienna Miller). In addition to these remarkable characters there are tables clad in what appear to be sheets out on the lawn, candles in glass jars wreathed in ivy, and everyone is swearing in a carefree way and addressing one another as darling. Michael is enchanted, so much so that the weekend remains with him throughout his adult life, representing something profound that is never made quite clear, either to him or to us — liberated individualism, perhaps, and a classy way with napery.

He becomes a lawyer in Bath, and marries an angry woman called Rebecca Alexander, largely in order to get closer to his wife’s Heywood-like family: her freely cursing father, her sexy, outrageous mother, and their wildly beautiful and unconventional household with its three enormous cheeseplants, and so on. Unfortunately, the marriage is tense and, once she becomes a mother, Rebecca grows even angrier. She takes to wearing stiletto-heeled boots and behaving meanly towards her husband. When, 16 years later, Adam Heywood calls and invites Michael to stay, he accepts.

This novel is almost very funny — Cusk has a magical ear for the excruciating things that people say to each other — and the set-up belongs to comic fiction. But the intention, it seems, is serious — despite which, we never really learn who Michael is; we never know why the Heywoods and the Alexanders should have such an effect on him. It emerges that this is not really a novel about knowing; what is important is feeling. Or, more precisely, what is important is recognising the presence of feeling. “A feeling I often used to have in those days was gradually forced upon me, the feeling that I had unintentionally left the proper path of my life”; “I had the feeling I had begun occasionally to have, as though I was reaching the bottom of a long fall into water”; “I had had this feeling several times, the feeling that I had missed an episode in an important series.” Sometimes, Michael seems a machine for turning emotion into psychology. And when he is not putting himself into analysis, he is scrutinising those around him. His baby son, for example, relishes “pointing out the obvious”, and treats everything as “a joke”. As for Rebecca, she is “overly assertive and somewhat self-centred and preoccupied in her dealings with me” (sure enough, a short while later, Rebecca smacks him with her handbag. She also throws a fruit bowl at his head). The Heywoods, needless to say, suffer a diminution of glamour on Michael’s return visit; under his psychiatric glare, they are found distinctly wanting. The posh, it transpires, are as pitiful as the rest of us. If Freud had gone to Cold Comfort Farm, he would have come to the same conclusion.

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