This past week, I read Arlington Park, a novel by Rachel Cusk. Cusk is obviously a talented writer, and her resume shows it: a Whitbread award and a shortlisting for Whitbread, the shortlist for the Orange Prize, and a citation from Granta as one of Britain's 20 best young writers. While blurbs on book covers rarely reflect what's on the pages therein, in Arlington Park's case, the promised "incisive" quality that book reviewers heralded turned out to be true. Unfortunately, despite all this, I just couldn't agree with the ends to which Cusk put her talent.Arlington Park follows six women trapped in privileged suburban life. The question of how to find fulfillment in suburban life crops up frequently in fiction, not the least in my own first novel. But the difference between the perspectives of Cusk's women and of women in, say, Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls, is vast.
