These things all happen in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir Lorenzo in Taos (1932), on which Second Place is based, as the brief afterword explains. The novel has a conventional frame: an outsider enters a constricted space a woman looks outside her marriage for sustenance an artist destabilizes a family’s life. Which is why her new novel, Second Place, is so perplexing. There is a spare intensity to her prose that makes it seem written with a thin person’s pen: a control that implicitly criticizes sloppiness of body or mind. But her exacting mien makes me, as a reader, feel awkward: too large, too wrinkled, too eager to please. This is not to say her work is mean or mean-spirited. She believes nerviness and irritation are necessary habits of mind to explore and put down on paper. Rachel Cusk illustration by Adrian Tomine
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