Once again, Cusk (the "Outline" trilogy) delivers a novel so thorny with ideas that every sentence merits a careful reading, yet crafted in language as ringingly clear as fine crystal. Her protagonist is M, a fiftyish woman dwelling contentedly in unidentified marshlands with her solid, devoted husband, Tony; they live off the land and nearby sea while turning over a second house they've constructed to visiting artists and writers. Having encountered L's paintings as a young woman, an experience of deep identification that changed the direction of her life, M is eager to make L a guest. (Cusk wrote the novel in tribute to Mabel Dodge Luhan's Lorenzo in Taos, which recalls a similar visit D. H. Lawrence made to Luhan in New Mexico.) Though deeply reflective, even cerebral, M is also gushingly guileless, and the reader can tell from their first correspondence that having L visit is not a good idea. Indeed, he arrives with gorgeous young Brett and proceeds to undermine M's world in escalatingly cruel ways. It's wrenching reading, yet in the end M has gracefully readjusted her life, as L has not. VERDICT A gorgeously sculpted story of living and learning; for all readers.

In Cusk's excellent new novel, following her Outline trilogy and essay collection, Coventry (2019), M. (the narrator) invites L. (a famous artist) to spend the summer at her family's home in a secluded marshland. Relationships form and unravel through small acts: a new hairstyle, a late-night swim, an invitation to sit for a portrait. These things happen, but they are not what the book is about. Rather, Second Place is about space and time, and who has the privilege to claim either. "I am here," L.'s paintings say to M., when she sees them in a Paris gallery 15 years before the summer at the marsh, giving her permission to say the same. "My time belongs to me," L. tells a houseguest who delivers a two-hour reading of an in-progress novel. There is a gendered asymmetry between L., who moves with an air of entitlement, and M., who recognizes herself when criticized, and also an expressive one between painting, described as providing "a location, a place to be," and language, "the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time." Cusk has written a novel about what it might mean to be whole within one's self and with others, and about the artist's responsibility and art's power.

Riffing on D.H. Lawrence's famously fraught visit with Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico, Cusk chronicles a fictional woman's attempt to find meaning in other people's art. Readers need not know anything about that literary-history byway, however, to enjoy this brooding tale. Highly praised for her recent, decidedly nonlinear Outline Trilogy, Cusk here rediscovers the joys of plot. Narrator M sets a dark tone with her opening recollection of how a meeting with the devil on a train leaving Paris opened her eyes to "the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things." Then she pulls back to her encounter the day before with an exhibition of paintings by an artist she calls L that spoke of "absolute freedom" to "a young mother on the brink of rebellion." Now, years later, divorced from her hypercritical first husband and a subsequent period of misery behind her, she is happily married to quiet, nurturing Tony and lives with him in "a place of great but subtle beauty" remote from the urban centers of whatever country this is. (Details are deliberately vague, but bravura descriptions of marshes and brambles evoke a fairy-tale landscape rather than New Mexico.) M clearly feels some dissatisfaction with this idyllic retreat since she writes to L through a mutual friend and invites him to stay in their "second place," a ruined cottage they rebuilt as a long-term refuge for guests. After some coy back and forth, L turns up on short notice with an unannounced young girlfriend in tow, forcing M to move her 21-year-old daughter, Justine, and her boyfriend, Kurt, to the main house. L clearly knows that M wants something from him (Cusk elliptically suggests a desire to be welcomed into an imaginative life M feels inadequate to enter on her own) and is determined not to provide it. Increasingly tense interactions among the three couples form the seething undercurrent to M's ongoing musings on art, truth, and reality. The inevitable big blowup is followed by reconciliations and relocations, capped by one of Cusk's characteristically abrupt conclusions with a bitter letter from L. Brilliant prose and piercing insights convey a dark but compelling view of human nature. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.