Arlington Park
Rachel Cusk
Rated: 3.13 of 5 stars
3.13
· 16 ratings · 253 pages · Published: 01 Jan 2006
In Arlington Park, men work, women look after children, and people generally do wha's expected of them. It's a world awash in contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. How are they to know right from wrong? How should they use their knowledge of other people's sufferings? What is the relationship of politics to their own domestic arrangements?
Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents.
Darkly comic, deeply affecting, and wise, Arlington Parkis a page-turning imagining of the extraordinary inner nature of ordinary life, by one of Britain's most exciting young novelists.