Introducing Rachel Cusk

It's always a thrill to make the acquaintance of a novelist with a keen vision uncluttered by irrelevant drama and detail. But Rachel Cusk published her first novel in 1993, so I can hardly claim to be introducing her to anybody. I saw her name on the NY Times list of outstanding twenty-first century novelists and checked one of her books at random—Outline—out of the library.

It didn't take long to notice that Cusk's perspective was unusual and her prose vivid yet strangely muted We learn in the opening pages that the nameless narrator is on a flight to Athens to teach a writing course, but the first thirty pages are largely devoted to the rambling reflections of the nameless Greek man sitting next to her, who she refers to throughout the book as "my neighbor."

Subsequent chapters are devoted to a variety of similar encounters with friends, colleagues, students, and passersby, during which they say a lot, and Faye (the name doesn't appear until near the end of the book) says little. As we read on, curious and perplexed, it becomes increasingly evident that these conversations have not been shaped to produce the kind of complex plot we might expect to see at the theater.  There is no plot. Or if there is, it's a plot that hasn't come to a point of clarity and resolution in the author's head. Cusk is giving us a portrait of a woman carefully observing other people, interacting with them, listening, asking unusual but revealing questions, perhaps giving a word of advice. The judgments she makes about these people can be subtle; they're sometimes brutal, more often elusive.

The narrator, divorced, with two young sons who call her at odd times,  seems to be adrift in a fathomless world, clinging to details in an attempt to sort things out.

At one or two points in Outline the narrator offers a more detailed description of her attitude, as in this minor soliloquy delivered from the deck of a pleasure boat on the Aegean Sea.

I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying - it seemed to me - was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become—to put it bluntly— anathema to me. There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

Many of the characters that surface in the course of the narrative seem to find themselves in varying states of dislocation. For example, in one chapter the narrator meets Paniotis, an old friend, at a bar in a shabby neighborhood in Athens. A long and minutely described scene ensues of ordering wine and food, meeting other guests, listening to their stories.

I asked Paniotis how long ago it was that he had travelled north with his daughter, and he said that it was very shortly after he and his wife had divorced. In fact it was the first time he had taken his children anywhere on his own. He remembered that in the car, driving out of Athens and into the hills, he had kept glancing at them on the back seat in the rear­view mirror, feeling as wrongful as if he were kid­napping them. He expected them, at any minute, to discover his crime and demand their immediate re­turn to Athens and their mother, but they did not: in fact, they made no comment on the situation at all, not during all the long hours of a journey in which Paniotis felt himself to be getting further and further away from everything trusted and known, everything familiar, and most of all from the whole security of the home he had made with his wife, which of course no longer even existed.

It's worth pointing out that although much of the book is devoted to other people telling their stories, little of the material takes the form of dialogue. Far more often, as in the paragraph above, the narrator begins with "he said that" or "she told me that" and fills in all the details herself.

At one point it occurred to me that the novel, though entirely different in tone, bore some resemblance to the works of the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg. This seemed like an odd comparison to me, and I was more than a little surprised to find in Coventry, a book of her essays, that Cusk has written an essay about Ginzburg. The first few lines, I think. offer an accurate description of Ginzburg's approach to life and writing, and of Cusk's as well:

The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been—in some mysterious sense are still being—composed. No context is required to read her: in fact, to read her is to realize how burdened literature frequently is by its own social and material milieux. Yet her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.

I read no further in that essay. Nor did I make an effort to explore the many critical pieces that have been written about Cusk in the course of her prolific career. Instead, I read Transit, the sequel to Outline, which includes portraits of the Albanian workmen who are remodelling the narrator's flat; a long description of Arabian Saluki hounds delivered by one of Faye's writing students; a dinner party at her brother's posh home in a village near Salisbury, where all the women are elegantly dressed and the children run wild; and much else.  

The third volume of the trilogy, Kudos, I'll keep in reserve for a rainy day. 

August, Cool and Beautiful

The weather gods have been too kind to us. Following a warm winter, who would have suspected we'd get a cool and beautiful summer? The ample rain has brought new life to our gardens, and even the lawn looks pretty good—at least the morning after I mow it.

The National Night Out in early August was a big hit once again on our block. It's the only time we actually converse with some of our neighbors, who are a diverse and generally cheerful bunch of mostly young and middle-aged couples. 

Hilary and I have somehow slipped into the category of old-timers; I don't know how that happened. But the eldest attendee, Elfrida, has lived on our block since 1962! I sampled  several strange, cheesy casseroles and enjoyed some piping-hot mini-wieners wrapped in bacon that were sitting at the bottom of a crock-pot.

Pleasant as it is here at home, Hilary and I have also been out and about to various state parks. On one excursion we brought our massive Grumman canoe along, elaborately strapped to the top of our tiny Carolla. After setting up camp at Savannah Portage SP we went for an evening paddle  at nearby Loon Lake, left the canoe by the landing, and returned early the next morning for another placid circuit. There was no one around. The lake was calm, and at one point  we had the pleasure of watching a family of loons drift by. You can watch them here: 

A few minutes later we came upon a pair of kingfishers who led us the rest of the way around the lake, keeping fifty yards ahead, swooping and diving from one branch to another, chattering away.  It's not the Boundary Waters, but it's a lot easier to get to.

After breaking camp we continued north, resisted the urge to revisit our beloved Meadowlands, but toured the Mesabi Range on Highway 169 from Hibbing to Tower and beyond. We ate lunch at the Sportsman's café in Hibbing, where our charming Jamaican waitress told us how she happened to settle down in northern Minnesota. We also spent some time cruising downtown Virginia, where my mom grew up.

The canoe once again proved to be useful at Vermilion State Park, where we'd rented an upscale camper cabin for the night. There isn't really much to do at that park. Trails are few, and it's impossible to see the lake unless you drive down to the landing or the smallish picnic area. But we enjoyed hanging out on the cabin deck, looking off into the trees. And once we hit the water we appreciated the park's lack of shore front development.

The camper cabins are fairly private, but the next morning we ran into our next-door neighbor, who was heading for the nearby parking lot. She and her husband had signed on to take the mail run around Lake Vermilion, by boat. (Something to consider for our next visit.)

The woman's name was Tamara Uselmann. She's a professor at North Dakota State, though the couple live in Pelican Rapids.

"You've heard of Pelican Rapids?" She seemed surprised.

"Sure. With a river flowing right through town and a nice coffee shop. It's right down the road from Maplewood State Park."

 She told us both her parents spoke Finnish at home. I told her a little about the nearby town of Embarrass, the Finnish "capital" of this part of the state. "And you probably know about New York Mills," I added.

"Yes, we know about New York Mills," she said. "We were raised there."

On our way out we stopped in at the Soudan Mine, which also serves as the park headquarters. I was hoping to get a refund for the firewood we hadn't used. While we were there, we got into conversation with one of the tour guides. He'd worked in the taconite mines for years, but had previously pursued a fairly successful career as an opera singer. Who would have guessed?

_______________________________

A few days later we headed north again to catch the Perseid meteor shower at Crow Wing State Park, this time with bikes instead of the canoe. We left in mid-afternoon, and paid a visit to Crane Meadows NWR along the way.

It was a clear night. We set up our camp chairs out in the road at midnight and looked up through a break in the trees that—just our luck—exposed a sliver of sky between Cassiopeia and  Perseus. Hilary saw the best one, a fireball that lasted several seconds. I missed that one, but saw seven shooting stars in all, for the most part bright, but short. At one point I saw two almost simultaneously in the same place, which gave me he impression that the meteor had broken apart at that moment, far above the Earth.

While we sitting out in the dark, we heard a deep, loud groan coming from the distant woods. It was a sound I'd never heard before, like the mooing of a cow, but somehow entirely different. A moose? Hardly likely in that part of the state. A bear? They don't sound like that.

The next morning we set off early on what might be the most beautiful stretch of the Paul Bunyan Trail. It runs through the woods from the park north along the Mississippi to Baxter. It seems to be mostly downhill in both directions, and there are some wonderful stretches lined with blackberries along the way.

Back at the park, we broke camp, and on our way out we stopped in to pay for the firewood we'd burned. I asked the ranger about the mysterious sound we'd heard. He paused a moment for effect, and then said, "Bullfrog."

Before turning south, however, we drove the eight miles up to Brainerd. We wanted to see what kind of development had been taking shape at the mostly abandoned Great Northern Railyard. Turns out there's a beauty salon, a gift-shop, an event center, and a outdoor-grill franchise, among other things. What interested us was the restaurant with a shady patio called Notch 8 (a railroad term for "full speed ahead"), run by the former chef from nearby Prairie Bay. The lunch special was BLT, carrot-ginger soup, and spinach peach salad with a sophisticated vinaigrette.  I would go back. 

Such excursions are vastly enriching, but there also a lot to be said for staying home. On a given day I might sit on the deck for quite a while, taking note of the slightest changes in the vegetation or watching the young robins eat the white berries off the gray dogwood shrubs, one after another, thus exposing the clusters of beautiful pink stems.

Ah! The black-eyed-susans we planted in May are finally blooming—one little blossom in the midst of a sea of tired Siberian bugloss.

 

    

Garden Tours

I had the opportunity recently on successive Wednesday mornings to visit five backyard gardens in the neighborhood as part of a U of MN OLLI seniors' program. I use the word "neighborhood" loosely here. One of the gardens was in West Bloomington, another in Bryn Mawr; one was a few blocks from the Parkway Theater in South Minneapolis, and two of the five were in suburbs not far from my house: Crystal and New Hope. All five were owned and tended by Master Gardeners, a designation reserved for those who have completed a program of instruction run by the University's Extension Service.

I haven't taken a "class" in many years. For the most part, I'd rather just read a book, proceeding at my own pace, following leads and digressions and taking a break or "dropping out" when I lose interest or another subject attracts my attention. I have a row of books sitting near at hand that I intend to get back to soon: The Beethoven Quartets; The Unity of the Odyssey; Susan Sontag: as Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh..

But seeing a garden is a lot different than reading about gardens, and I enjoyed both the variety of styles and the unstructured character of the presentations. The hosts described their efforts and offered bits of advice as they led us—a group of maybe thirty women and men—across swards of grass and along flagstone paths through varieties of hosta, for example, that would almost rival those at the U of MN's landscape arboretum.

Some of the students knew each other. One woman told me she meets every week with five or six friends, some of whom were also there, to go walking. "Where do you walk?" I asked. "We pick a different route every week," she said.

One of the gardeners had dedicated most of her yard to edibles. Her peach tree was laden with 210 peaches, she told us. And there they were! She also told us how to prepare beds to grow blueberries, described the advantages of creeping thyme as a substitute for grass, and advised us when to eat the leaves on our linden trees. (Early.) 

As we made our way around the house she paused to eat a pod off a radish plant that had gone to seed weeks ago.

"Not bad," she said.

Once the group had continued on into the back yard, I tried one myself. (Terrible!)

The highlight of the garden in West Bloomington was an impressive waterfall cascading down to a stream, under a bridge, and into a swamp lined with colorful pink Joe-Pye Weed (I think). The plantings themselves were gorgeous, but I lost interest when the woman began to describe how the waterfall actually worked--I'll never build one--and I ducked out the back.

From the master gardener in Bryn Mahr I learned why we shouldn't have planted Amur maples along our fence-line (he had planted a few himself), and what we should sprinkle on our lawn in spring as a pre-emergent inhibitor: corn gluten meal. I was happy to learn that he treated his compost pile to benign neglect, the same way I do, though he emphasized that it's important to keep it wet. And he also offered this sage advice: Never divide a hosta. I don't know why he said that, and I never got around to asking.

Before long I found myself offering authoritative-sounding advice to bystanders who wanted to know if wild ginger spread (not that much) and what color the blossoms on a redbud are (not red but pinkish purple).

On our final week we met at a house in Crystal that was build in the early 1960s. The owner described his back yard as a woodland garden, but it looked very prim and open to me. The pebbled paths occupied more space than the plants, and the patio/entertainment center, located well away from the house, was like something out of House Beautiful. All very nice ... but not the way I would do it.

If you want to see a woodland garden in all its ragged glory, come to our house. 

But isn't that one of the pleasures of gardening? You work with your soil, and your patterns of light, your budget, your level of enthusiasm, and your sense of taste. It was obvious to me that the gardeners featured in the tour were spending a lot of time on their gardens, whether in the spirit of recreation or religious devotion. I didn't see a familiar annual anywhere. No impatiens, no browallia, no ageratum.

I can well imagine that many of the students finished the round of visits inspired by a few new ideas, but also gratified to recognize or reaffirm that the garden waiting for them back at the house wasn't all that bad, either. 

And by the way, did I tell you about our new volunteer cherry orchard? Or the hummingbird summer-sweet we brought home from Gerten's the other day?