Arlington Park

A day in the life of several married women living in the fictional middle class suburb of Arlington Park, culminating (in true Cusk style) in a dinner party.I found the opening sections compelling—every exchange was stuffed with tension and subtext—but the waters were gradually muddied with less elegantly-handled class commentary. It grates slightly to read someone of Cusk's background picking at the threads of aspiration culture, class mobility, and internalised misogyny in this way.Outside in the shop a sudden crowd had formed at the till, of girls with sunglasses pushed back on their heads and girls in tiny vests, girls with hair chemically coloured, curled or straightened, fat girls with white elephant's legs in short skirts, girls who were morose or screamed with laughter or talked into their mobile phones.But it's not all misses on that front:None of them, not even Joe, understood what it was to be so proximate to oblivion. They were hallmarked, like silver: they saw the world as categorised, not chaotic. But she, Christine, was only one generation removed from abandonment: she, the offspring of a scrap, a piece of litter blowing in the wind, felt always the presence of the enormous darkness from which she had come.A flavour of resentment (born of wasted potential and sacrifice) underscores each section, punctuated with impotent acts of rebellion, which works to unite the women, but also homogenises their characters, making them increasingly difficult to distinguish.The feelings expressed around motherhood are expectedly and refreshingly honest, but I felt most sentiments had already been excellently covered in [b:A Life's Work 522426 A Life's Work On Becoming a Mother Rachel Cusk https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312001649l/522426.SX50.jpg 930836]. And maybe it's because I'm accustomed to Cusk's sparser Outline-era voice, but I found the maximalist descriptions of shopping centres, suburban streets and parks uninspiring, and often cringily grandiose:A young man in an anorak flew his kite, his legs astride on the grass, his arms braced against the powerfully tugging strings as if he were holding on to the world itself.Some more bits I liked:Juliet never thought about school until the moment she walked through its wrought-iron gates. It was Benedict who thought, in order to be extraordinary. He ran off their joint life as if it were a generator fuelled by Juliet, and then he separated himself and thought.All men are murderers, Juliet thought. All of them. They murder women. They take a woman, and little by little they murder her.It was hard, harder than she'd expected it to be, to take the vigorous, joyful, wild body of Katherine and clothe it in a school uniform. Until that moment the possibilities for Katherine had seemed endless.Katherine's femaleness had seemed like a joyful, a beautiful thing. It had seemed invincible, even in its halfformed fragility. She had not realised what she was. She had only delighted in it, in her female being.Now, though, she was different. She knew she was a girl. She returned from school full of a kind of programmatic agony. Her soul was in training. They had told her what she was, and now she knew. She didn't play with the boys in the playground, she told Juliet. Juliet asked why not, and Katherine shrugged.None of the girls do, she said.Amanda felt that if she were not married, it would not have been required of her to go to the butcher.These visits seemed to emanate from a core of physical embroilment, from a fleshly basis that sought out other flesh by which to feed itself. It all seemed somehow grotesquely related, the conjoining and making of bodies and the dismemberment and ingestion of them.The room, the house, even Arlington Park itself, increasingly wore for her the lineaments of a lived past into which future possibilities were unable to intrude; of a fundamental sadness that was the unalterable relic of experience.