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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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In the
Fold by Rachel Cusk |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Belonging Fans of dark
comedy will be most appreciative of the talent Rachel Cusk
displays in her latest novel, In the
Fold. Each character has been formed through a sense of place and through
the manners that life in that place expect those who
are there must follow. Cusk’s presents characters
in the past and present as an efficient way of presenting their formation. The
contrast Cusk presents, as well as a range of
morals, adds to the comedy of the expected behavior depending on who and where one is. This ensemble of characters may be
the strangest you’ll see within the pages of single book. Here’s an excerpt, from
the beginning of Chapter 2, pp. 32-35: Recently a
series of events caused me unexpectedly to meet the Hanburys
again. I
mentioned once to my wife, Rebecca, that Adam Hanbury
still lived in Doniford, no more than sixty miles
away. At one time we had been inseparable; now we could see each other any
day we chose, yet we had not met for five or six years. “He’ll
come around,” said Rebecca sagaciously. I guessed
she was referring to the “big wheel,” a theory of events she had lately taken
to propounding. Its basis was that existence is not linear but circular and
repetitive. The idea was that you didn’t have to go out and get anything — you
just sat and waited for it to come to you, and if it was meant to, it would. “He might
just keep going the way he’s going,” I said. “We all might.” “It’ll
turn,” said Rebecca. She
revolved something invisible on the axis of her hand to illustrate her point.
I was surprised to see how slow and grinding the
revolution was, as she conceived it. Her hand moved only an inch or two. She
spoke quite blithely, though. It was not a chore to her, this turning. It was
a spectacle from which evidently she derived a certain joy. I wondered
whether the fact of our estrangement altered what I knew of the three years
during which Adam and I were friends. It made me feel uneasy suddenly to
think of it, as though everything that had happened since rested structurally
and irremediably on that intensity that had given way so silently to
indifference. Or, as though I had failed at numerous points in my life to
establish whether it was for their lasting significance or their transitory
attractiveness that I had chosen my circumstances, with the strange result
that in the light of my friendship with Adam Hanbury,
the existence I had constructed without him appeared to me momentarily as
both insignificant and totally binding. “I heard
he got married’ I said.”I think they have some
children.” My wife
shrugged and smiled a mysterious smile. It was unclear whether she was
acknowledging that she could provide no proof of this or indicating that the
subject of marriage and children was beneath her commentary. I wanted to take
issue with the big wheel and the idea that we were all stuck on it, going
round and round, endlessly held at a remove from the things we wanted. I
suspected Rebecca only liked it because it proved that nothing was your
fault. “I don’t
understand,” I persisted, “why we don’t see each other. We used to see each
other every day.” “I don’t
know,” said Rebecca, who was apparently becoming irritated. “It obviously
wasn’t your time.” She meant,
in terms of predestination. “Was it
all a waste, then?” “How
should I know?” “You’re
always telling me I should ask more questions.” “Some
questions don’t have answers,” said Rebecca. She looked fatigued. She fanned
her face with her hand. She had
complained several times that I never asked her anything. What should I ask
her? She didn’t know — that was one of the questions that didn’t have
an answer. Sometimes I saw in her a yearning for a time of reckoning that I
felt she didn’t fully understand. She seemed to think that a move into an era
of analysis and interrogation would constitute a new, living chapter in our
relationship or a new source of nourishment, as though after a famine; whereas
to me it was clear that it would signify only that our relationship was over,
that the disaster had occurred and that neutral forces of rationality; of law
and order and civilization, were now washing over the wound. Marriage seemed
to me to depend on two people staying together in time. It was like a race
you ran together, a marathon. You kept your eyes ahead and you tried to
surmount your weariness, and you reconciled yourself to the fact that while
it may not be strictly enjoyable, at least running this race was healthy and
strenuous and relieved you of the burden of thinking what else you might do
with your time. I remembered a period of weeks or months when waking to the
fact of my life with Rebecca was like waking to find an intricate moving pattern
of sunlight on my body. She was
wearing a garment that resembled a complicated piece of Victorian underwear.
It was cross-hatched with ribbons and little buttons and straps and it was
edged with gathered lace all around the neck, so that in its painstaking
envelopment of her form it seemed almost to be expressing love for her. Her
face was mournful. I had the feeling I had begun to have occasionally, as
though I were reaching the bottom of a long fall into water and were
experiencing the change in pressure as I hollowed out the end of my
trajectory and began to rise again. All the things I had gone streaking past
on the way down now hovered around and above me, immanent, patient. “Given
that you always claim to feel so powerless,” I said, “I don’t see why you
cleave to theories that make a virtue out of passivity “What are
you talking about?” she said. Her pale
blue eyes flashed past mine, little rents in her countenance. She looked
momentarily lively. I had come to view Rebecca’s demeanor as involuntarily
symptomatic of her consciousness, as though it were a drug she had taken
whose crests and falls I had learned to read. “If I
haven’t seen Adam Hanbury, it’s because I haven’t
bothered to pick up the telephone and talk to him. It isn’t because of any
wheel or because it wasn’t our ‘time.’” In fact,
as I spoke I realized that, as was often the case with Rebecca and me, the
truth lay somewhere between us, lost. “Call him,
then,” shrugged Rebecca, with the clear suggestion that she regarded this as
a typically dull, even a craven way to proceed, compared
with waiting for Adam to “come around.” That
conversation was the first sign of the Hanburys, as
a green spear poking through the brown earth might be the first sign of
spring. Rebecca and I lived in What will
resonate for some readers is the clarity that what a place meant to us at one
time on life doesn’t necessarily endure to others, and rarely transfers to
others who weren’t part of the formative experience. Cusk
uses In
the Fold to enliven and enlighten with humor the ways in which our
memories form a greater reality than our experience. We end up belonging to
the people and places that make a difference in our lives. Steve Hopkins,
November 20, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December
2006 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/In
the Fold.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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