The Walrus Reads

Authors pick their favourite books of 2021

Second Place

Rachel Cusk’s latest protagonist, a mid-career writer referred to only as M, lives with her husband on an isolated patch of English coast. It’s a secluded life, one in which she’s seemingly content, especially when playing host to a continual drip of artists who come for ad hoc retreats at her nearby guest cottage. One day, not long after a recognizable disaster halts the world, the acclaimed painter L arrives, making good on a long-neglected promise to visit and stay a while. L is both a stranger and the object of M’s long-time fascination — she feels a kinship with his work, and this one-sided relationship initially blinds her to the bad behaviour of the man behind the art. Cusk models her novel on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir, Lorenzo in Taos, which describes D. H. Lawrence’s stay at Luhan’s New Mexico home and the rifts he caused as a difficult guest. With this as her framework, Cusk toys with ideas of art, freedom, and gender. Tatum Dooley, creator of the newsletter Canadian Art Forecast, recommended this book to me, describing it as “a novel that portrays male artists as brats” — an enticing premise that is fulfilled by L’s constant disrupting of M’s domestic peace. There is a sense of humour and virtuosity in Second Place that makes it the perfect follow-up to the author’s Outline trilogy, proving Cusk’s masterful use of language and form with her signature acerbity. marlowe granados is a writer and filmmaker living in Toronto. She is the author of 2020’s Happy Hour, a novel that the New York Times called “confident, charismatic and alive to the pleasure of observation.”