The Bradshaw Variations

Curtis Sittenfeld

[The Bradshaw Variations] offers many pleasures. Pretty much every page gleams with Cusk's darkly humorous powers of observation…
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

The Bradshaw family of suburban London is discontent. Thomas Bradshaw has taken a sabbatical from his job to learn to play the piano; his wife, Tonie, has become head of a university English department; their eight-year-old daughter, Alexa, watches as father and mother begin to suffocate under the failure of their expectations. The Bradshaws' brothers, sisters, parents, and in-laws, though sometimes faintly amusing, are no better off. Sister-in-law Claudia, a painter, never paints, blaming her nonproductivity on husband Howard, Thomas's older brother. Little brother Leo and his uneducated wife, Susie, drink too much—public knowledge because their children tattle on them—and the older generation of parents disapproves of them all. Cusk (Arlington Park) dissects her characters with a surgical precision, and all can be diagnosed with the same bourgeois malady: acute but indeterminate angst about the nature of existence. Cusk is a gifted writer who has a knack for razor-sharp characterizations, but the lack of plot—everyone is sad, little is done—is a serious detriment. (Apr.)

Library Journal

As she has done so capably in previous books like The Lucky Ones and Arlington Park, Cusk tours the reader through the gentrified neighborhoods of London and its surrounding villages. The Bradshaws at the center of this novel are Thomas and Tonie, who have recently switched household roles. Tonie has accepted the post of head of her university's English department, providing Thomas with all the excuse he needs to drop out of the workforce, take up the daily nurture and care of eight-year-old Alexa, and, at leisure, pursue his dormant musical interests. On the periphery of their lives are related Bradshaws—Thomas's brothers and their families and two sets of grandparents, who are either slightly bemused by or thoroughly disapproving of the new domestic arrangements. VERDICT With stylish writing and trenchant insight, Cusk mines the emotional killing fields of domestic disharmony in another compelling serving of highbrow chick lit. Recommended.—Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Kirkus Reviews

Diamond-hard portrait of family life as warfare. Sometimes it's a simmering conflict, like Thomas and Tonie Bradshaw experiencing confusion and resentment over their redefined roles as he takes a leave of absence to care for their daughter Alexa when Tonie is promoted from part-time lecturer to full-time head of her university's English department. Sometimes it's loud, disorderly combat, prompted by Thomas' brother Howard perennially augmenting the chaos in his household while wife Claudia wails that all these kids and animals and stuff are keeping her from painting. It can be ugly hand-to-hand maneuvers for advantage, as the men's father, Charles, refuses to have tea because his wife is late, or forces her to get rid of six boxes containing childhood mementos, which she weepily manipulates Thomas into storing in his much smaller house. Or it can be the detonation of really nasty landmines: "What a waste!" moans Mrs. Swann when daughter Tonie proudly displays new curtains she had made from antique silk. "I've got boxes of old pairs I could have given you . . . all beautifully lined, with proper pelmets." Only the youngest Bradshaw brother Leo and his wife Susie don't seem aggressive-and that's because they're drunk most of the time, as their young children are well aware. The Swanns and elder Bradshaws are cold, withholding monsters, Claudia is a professional martyr, Howard is jovially clueless, Leo and Susie are drowning in insecurity; Thomas and Tonie, though more substantially characterized, are no more engaging. The plot, such as it is, lurches forward during Thomas' year at home as he becomes unmoored and Tonie is tempted by infidelity, developments that both play a role in Alexa'snear-fatal bout of meningitis. Somehow it's no surprise that this dark tale climaxes with the dog dying. There's no denying Whitbread Award winner Cusk's talent and gimlet eye for revealing details, but she used to have more compassion for human frailty than she's displayed in her recent work (The Last Supper, 2009, etc.).

The Barnes & Noble Review

Only a very brave writer, or a very foolish one, would begin a novel with the words "What is art?" The British novelist Rachel Cusk is no fool, and indeed there is both courage and ambition on display throughout The Bradshaw Variations, her seventh novel, which is indebted to and in conversation with Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata, as well as his less well known 1896 nonfiction work, What is Art? As Zadie Smith demonstrated with On Beauty, which owed similar debts to Howards End, when a talented novelist seeks to reconceive yesterday's masterpieces through a contemporary prism, there is potentially much to be gained.

Using the three Bradshaw brothers Thomas, Howard and Leo as the root, third and fifth of her tonic chord, Cusk examines Tolstoy's assertion that art is based "upon this capacity of man to receive another man's expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself." In a series of delicate and finely observed scenes, her characters generally fail that essential empathy, and with it their art, both created and lived, also fails. Over the course of the story, which spans a year, Thomas has decided to spend a year at home, learning the piano, while his restless wife Tonie accepts a promotion that returns her to the workforce, leaving him to care for their seven-year-old daughter Alexa; Howard, a successful businessman, experiences a health scare -- a spot on his lung -- while trying to manage his neurotic wife Claudia's disappointments and frustrations. Leo, the mild youngest brother, and his alcoholic wife Susie are gestured at and then largely abandoned. But the presence of an elder generation of unhappy and dysfunctional parents suggests that, no matter what the generational trappings, the song remains the same.

Cusk is at her best when she steps down off her authorial podium and brings her infallibly sensitive eye to the rhythms of these wounded, struggling families. There's a lovely, true scene in which Howard is drawn into the warm intimacy of his piano teacher's home. "When he comes here he is reminded of a closer more sensually vivid experience of the body that he did not realise, until now, he had forsaken." But Cusk deflates these moments when she switches into lecture mode, a voice more suited to (and borrowed from) Tolstoy's era than our own, where it smacks more of pedantry than wisdom. And so the bridge she has built between the centuries teeters and ultimately collapses beneath the weight of too much portentous philosophizing. Open The Bradshaw Variations more or less at random, and you're likely to find a passage much like this one:

It strikes her now that life is not linear, a journey, a passage, but a static process of irreversible accretion. It is a perspective that moves, passing over it all like the sun, now illuminating, now casting into shadow. The angle changes, the relation of one thing to another, the proportion of dark to light; but experience itself is block-like, is cumulative and fixed.

Declamatory sections like this one are a shame because, besides being tedious reading -- especially when they come hard upon one another as they do here -- these unwelcome authorial intrusions choke a narrative that otherwise unfolds with subtlety and grace. That may well be part of The Bradshaw Variations' game -- as the title and the opening question suggest, this is a book with a keen self-awareness about art and the artist's role in creation (as well as in self-creation, particularly among the novel's women). But one never escapes the feeling that there are two books uneasily joined here, an artful domestic drama married to a manifesto on creativity and its discontents, and one wishes Cusk hadn't hammered home the latter so relentlessly.

In the end, this slim but overstuffed novel rests heavily upon its overworked conceit, bending precariously beneath the weight Cusk places on it. It's the sort of book in which a character happens to be reading a thematically relevant story -- in this case, The Kreutzer Sonata itself -- at a key moment. ("What is art?" is also clearly intended to echo Tolstoy's opening, "What is love?" another question Cusk grapples with. Trains, which play a big part in Tolstoy, punctuate Cusk's novel as well. And so on.) The Bradshaw Variations feels very much like a novel built around A Big Idea, a worthy authorial impulse but one that sacrifices the lovely half-book lurking in there somewhere.

--Mark Sarvas