Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Arlington Park (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23, 248 pages), is a subtle, melancholic tale of a day in the life of a group of housewives living in a London suburb. The novel is written with elegance, style and wit by one of Britain’s most talented authors.
It was a rainy day in Arlington Park. “The rain fell on Arlington Park, fell on its empty avenues and its well pruned hedges, on its schools and its churches, on its trees and its gardens. It fell on its Victorian terraces with their darkened windows, on its rows of bay fronted houses, on its Georgian properties behind their gates, on its maze of tidy streets where the little two-storey houses were painted pretty colours. It fell joyously over the dark, deserted sward of the park, over its neat paths and bushes. It beat down, washing the pavements, sluicing along the drains, drumming on the bonnets of the parked cars.”
Arlington Park is home to upwardly mobile young couples with small children. The husbands go off to work in the morning; the wives take the children to school, tidy their houses, meet one another occasionally for morning coffee or an excursion to the shopping mall, where they have lunch and spend the hours trying on clothes until it’s time to pick up the children again and prepare supper. We could just as well be in Connecticut or Marin County, but for the English weather.
Juliet is married to Benedict, who “came to life in the mornings … as though life were a river he had rested beside, before climbing back into his one-man canoe and paddling off upstream.”
Louisa “always seemed very fractured and busy and distrait, as though she had some difficult secret, some difficult burden at home she was unable to tell you about.”
When her husband had left for work and her older child for school, Amanda “had a feeling of rapid ascent, as though the members of her household were sandbags she was heaving one by one out of the basket of a hot-air balloon.”
The neighboring “lower” suburb of Redbourne “reminded Christine of the insufficiency of her control of destiny, the fatal slightness of its degrees, where the smallest shift to left or right could produce a world altered in every particular.”
Solly takes in a series of lodgers, trendy young women from whom she learns to rekindle her femininity. Maisie had only recently moved from London to Arlington Park; for her, “[t]he room, the house, even Arlington Park itself, increasingly were … the lineaments of a lived past into which future possibilities were unable to intrude; of a fundamental sadness that was the unalterable relic of experience.”
London and the excitement and dangers of the big city seem far away from Arlington Park, the very reason most of these couples have moved to the tranquility and safety of the suburbs. But the price is high. In visiting the homes of her characters throughout the 24 hours of her story, Miss Cusk describes their frustrations and yearnings with delicious irony yet genuine empathy. The novel culminates in a hilarious dinner party at Christine’s house where the hostess gets progressively more intoxicated and lets her usually subdued ebullient self bubble to the surface.
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There is, in fact, little certainty in Certainty (Little, Brown, $23.99, 312 pages), the first novel by Canadian author Madeleine Thien. Miss Thien is a talented writer. She writes with a sense of beauty in her descriptions, be they of North Borneo, Jakarta, Holland or her native Canada, the locales of her multi-faceted story.
“Certainty” begins in 1943, during the Japanese occupation of North Borneo, as 11-year-old Matthew and his playmate Ani spend their days in and around the village of Sandakan, avoiding the Japanese. Ani has lost both her parents; Matthew’s father collaborates, and the boy watches as the Japanese murder his father at the end of the war, an event that continues to haunt him.
Matthew and his mother move away, and his mother remarries. Matthew returns to Sandakan and Ani when he is 18: “Everything I loved was there… . But people remembered my father. They knew what he had done during the war. They remembered things I hadn’t known at the time. I came to see there was no place for me there, that what I wanted had disappeared long ago.”
Ani keeps her pregnancy from Matthew and breaks their relationship so Matthew will go to Melbourne to study. There he meets and marries Clara, a young Chinese woman from Hong Kong. They emigrate to Vancouver, where they are forced to renounce their dreams of teaching for mundane jobs as a seamstress and a cook. They have a daughter, Gail, named for “a gale wind, a strong wind.”
Years pass. Matthew feels compelled to return to Asia. Ani now lives with their son in Jakarta, but Matthew does not tell the boy who he is, nor does he ever tell Gail, a free spirit and maker of radio documentaries, that she has a half-brother.
Gail finds a letter informing her father of Ani’s death, and she goes to Holland, where Ani lived during the last years of her life, to find out who Ani was. Gail dies, inexplicably, during her sleep on an assignment in Canada shortly after her return from the Netherlands.
It’s a difficult story to follow, as the plot does not unfold in a straight line but weaves from place to place without regard to chronology. There are many loose ends and numerous themes only briefly touched upon: Political events such as the Japanese occupation and the rise and fall of Sukarno, the world of radio and radio documentaries, the intricacies of code-breaking as Gail seeks to decipher the diary of a Japanese prisoner of war about whom she is preparing a documentary.
The characters are all gentle, thoughtful people lacking in passion, with the exception of Gail, who is full of life and curiosity. Conflicts arise not between characters but from the vicissitudes of fate and inner emotional turmoil: Ani makes a sacrifice she later regrets, Matthew never seems to overcome the fear and anxiety of his youth, Gail’s death does not seem integral to the plot and the men suffer loss in silence.
Nor is there a sense of ethnic heritage in “Certainty.” Miss Thien’s characters come from a rich variety of cultures and backgrounds — Malaysian, Chinese, Canadian, Dutch, Dutch-Indonesian — yet there seems no difference between them.
Despite certain shortcomings, “Certainty” is an interesting, well-written story. Ms. Thien has a gift for descriptive prose. Here is how she describes Ani’s experience as a young girl helping the Sandarkan fishermen: “Once, [the fisherman] had taken her underwater. He had shown her how to release the air from her lungs, a stream of bubbles trailing from their lips, their weight sinking them to the sea floor. Schools of fish brushed their bodies, circling them in a well of colour. Below, weeds unfurled to touch them. When they came up for air, he told her how to listen for the sound of the ikan selar kuning, with its deep-yellow stripe, which made a noise like the wind.”
The jungle descriptions of Matthew’s childhood, the cold, gray rain of Vancouver, the teeming life of Jakarta, and the flat translucent beauty of Friesland in the Netherlands are beautifully alive.
Corinna Lothar is a Washington writer and critic.
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