Arlington Park

Lucy Ellmann

Arlington Park is the kind of book that makes you burn things on the stove and berate your husband. Cusk is good at identifying what she fears and reviles. The challenge would be to say what she cares about, even if it makes her sound silly. Dignity isn’t everything. Honesty is.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

In this devastating ensemble novel, Whitbread Award-winner Cusk (Saving Agnes) exposes the roiling inner lives and not-so-quiet desperation of young mothers in the well-to-do London suburb Arlington Park. The book's single day begins with an epic rainstorm that wakes part-time private-school English teacher Juliet Randall, who spent the previous evening at a wealthier neighbor's home and was told, in front of husband Benedict, "You want to be careful.... You can start to sound strident at your age." As Amanda Clapp strains to maintain her house's empty perfection, a multi-kid play date gets out of control. Maisie Carrington feels "imprisoned for life" by her frosty, upper-crust childhood, and can barely contain her violent feelings toward her own daughters. Christine Lanham, a newcomer to the class distinction her marriage has brought her, abhors the hypocrisy that surrounds her, but knows she will never leave her family. The story line coils around each woman's home until it gathers the group for a drunken dinner party, where husbands express pleasure with their privilege while fretting that something feels amiss, and children, exhausted by their mothers' alternating neglect and desperate love, sleep like the dead leaving the women holding hot coals of their silent insights. Their plight is an old story, but Cusk makes it incisively vivid. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In the opening pages of this latest from Whitbread winner Cusk (Saving Agnes), Juliet is so incensed by the highhandedness of a wealthy dinner host and husband Benedict's indifferent response that she chops off her long, lustrous hair. The novel then moves to other denizens of the morally bankrupt English suburb that gives the book its name. Amanda tries desperately to fit in, finally succeeding in getting several women to drop by for coffee; Maisie ponders art, beauty, and why she left London; Solly learns something about her repressed life from a charismatic Italian boarder. Most of these characters end up at Christine's for a dinner party that clarifies the chilling anomie of places like Arlington Park. Christine would be its soul if it had one; brassy, tipsy, and eager for everyone to make her life fun, she's frustrated by the town's low horizons but exemplifies them as well. Cusk is pitch perfect at capturing the dammed-up people that make Arlington Park what it is, so carefully calibrating their doubts and dismissals that they veer straight off the page. They're not always good company-this reviewer threw the book down halfway through, swearing to get out of town-but in her luminous if disturbing study Cusk has done important work in giving them voice. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/06].-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Suburban motherhood is no picnic in this latest examination of intertwined lives from British novelist Cusk (The Lucky Ones, 2004, etc.). The action takes place during a single rainy day in a well-pruned English suburb. But though its streets are tree-lined, its shops exclusive, its houses ranging from pretty to grand, Arlington Park is not entirely sheltered from the problems of the world. While dropping their older children at school and toting their toddlers around on errands, the no-longer-so-young mothers worry about impoverished gypsies, people dying of malnutrition, earthquake victims in Indonesia, ecological destruction and the four-year-old girl abducted from their own prosperous enclave. (She's found dead toward the end, a denouement in keeping with the novel's generally dark tone.) Is there something they should do about these unpleasant realities? How can they help anyone else, when they feel so helplessly adrift themselves? In previous fiction, and in her poignant memoir A Life's Work (2001), Cusk sensitively balanced an honest depiction of parenting's often overwhelming demands with tender acknowledgment of its joys. In this book, children are nearly always a burden, husbands prompt little besides bitterness and the one protagonist who's still working finds her job as a schoolteacher mostly a reminder of the intellectual ambitions she failed to fulfill. As usual with this deft and astute writer, the prose is elegant, the characterizations spot-on. Frustrated Juliet, obsessive Amanda, conflicted city transplant Maisie, pregnant-yet-again Solly and in particular angrily exuberant, confrontational Christine are wholly believable and uncomfortably familiar. Such is the author'sskill that few readers will be able to escape a sense of squirming empathy for these women's frequent bouts of self-pity and vertiginous feeling of not being in control of their relatively privileged lives. The sour aftertaste their stories leave, however, is a new development in Cusk's work-and not a welcome one. Accomplished, honest and uncompromising, but not a whole lot of fun.