ARLINGTON PARK
by Rachel Cusk
Faber & Faber, £14.99; 256pp

MANY WRITERS ADDRESS the complex subject of modern motherhood, but few navigate those choppy waters as well as Rachel Cusk. It seems there is not one aspect of the lunacy of motherhood that she cannot distil into elegant, evocative prose. She gives a clear, controlled voice to the inarticulate fury that all women with children will recognise, even if they prefer not to acknowledge it.

Somehow, she manages to do all this without descending into bitterness. The tightrope that mothers tread — between wanting to strangle the little darlings while loving them at the expense of all else (marriage, self, career) — is nimbly negotiated.

Set in a genteel middle-class London suburb, the action of Arlington Park takes place in a single day. We drop in on the various inhabitants. There’s Juliet, whose husband Benedict teaches to great acclaim at the local state school and whose own academic potential has been flattened in the face of family and her husband’s career; there’s Christine, disorganised, histrionic with frustration; Amanda, whose barely controlled aggression is channelled into obsessive housework; Maisie, with the handsome husband and low self-esteem.

Cusk is a master of detail, as if no aspect of daily life in Arlington Park, however banal, could be irrelevant. This is a typical middle-class enclave, surrounded (or, as some of the characters might say, besieged) by urban deprivation. Within its tree-lined streets the inhabitants enjoy a feeling of safety, of affluent tribalism. Yet for every part that feels cocooned by the prevailing order, the expensive cars and high house prices, another feels trapped, at times lifeless.

This is the nature of suburbia: tidy streets, neat hedges, unthreatening dinner-party conversations — such mind-numbing perfection. For the husbands of Arlington Park this is satisfactory. They leave for work, their wives and children nicely compartmentalised, and return to a ten-minute bedtime story and a bottle of rioja. On paper, they should have fulfilled wives; in fact their women are all, to a greater or lesser extent, demented. It’s the age-old story: if a woman feels trapped by men, marriage and motherhood, moving to suburbia, desensitised and sanitised, will only seal her imprisonment further.

There is a distinct feeling that not everyone will get out alive. As her husband prepares for another stimulating day’s work, Juliet imagines a conversation with her former English teacher, whose expectations had been so high: “Dear Mrs Mountford, you must be wondering why you haven’t heard from me in all these years. The thing is, I was murdered, Mrs Mountford. My husband Benedict murdered me. He was very gentle about it; it didn’t really hurt at all. In fact, I hardly knew it was happening.”
The imperceptible but relentless loss of self that defines so much of marriage and motherhood is at the core of this book. Every woman looks in the mirror sometimes and asks what became of the smooth-faced girl she once was, whether the house, husband and kids were a fair exchange for her size-ten jeans and limitless possibilities. The answer here appears to be a yes; but an equivocal one.

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