Faber £14.99 pp240

Rachel Cusk’s unillusioned memoir of becoming a mother, A Life’s Work, caused howls of protest from the Buggy Brigade. Those who persist in seeing parenthood as a transfiguring experience, not only for themselves but also for anyone fortunate enough to be in the vicinity of their children, won’t much like Cusk’s funny and exhilaratingly unrepentant new novel either.

It takes its title from a rain-sodden but upmarket suburb where a group of wives and mothers battles with feelings of displacement, disappointment, disaffection, rage and erasure. They may have escaped the dismal sort of life they glimpse while speeding through neighbouring areas of Redbourne and Firley (full of hoodies, pram-wheeling teens and “cauliflower-haired old ladies in motorised wheelchairs”), but they still feel trapped. They have reached their forties, are worn down by small children, resent the comparative freedom enjoyed by their husbands, and feel that something indefinable has gone wrong. Most of them are on the verge of giving up altogether, so that even an outing to a hideous new shopping mall is looked forward to as some sort of escapist treat, one that makes them feel again, if only for a moment, that “life is full of possibilities”.

One of the mothers is brutally described as “a sack stuffed with children, a woman who had spent and spent her life until there was none left”. Another, with an unspoken sense of identification, comments of her daughter’s favourite toy: “Robbie was grey and worn out with Ella’s need for him. He looked shapeless and insensate with the drudgery of love”. Their husbands tend to be bemused and unsupportive. Arriving home from work, one asks, “What’s been happening here?” as if he had never before noticed the quotidian mess made by his children. Exchanging notes on how they have spent their respective days, his wife finds herself obliged to “describe his children to him as though he had never met them before, or as though they were something of which he might eventually be persuaded to make a considered purchase”.

Arlington Park is less a novel than a series of vignettes that nevertheless builds to a satisfying and integrated whole, culminating in a disastrous dinner party. There is something formal, even stately, about Cusk’s prose, suggesting that her characters use words to hold the world together. For embattled women, language is the last weapon left in the arsenal. Images seem to have been picked over and inspected from every angle before they are used, often in ways that are as exact as they are unexpected, as when the end of the dinner party is described from the point of view of its inebriated hostess: “Suddenly there was an upheaval, as though the evening had been turned over, like a clod of earth turned over by a spade.”

Cusk never patronises her characters but gives the impression of being right down in there with them, like a journalist embedded with troops. She reports back from the domestic war zone with cool objectivity in this elegantly contrived and deliriously enjoyable novel.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.49 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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