Picking over the pieces

MEMOIR: HILARY FANNINreviews Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation By Rachel Cusk Faber and Faber, 152pp. £12.99

RACHEL CUSK has written another memoir, her second already. With Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, the controversial English novelist, author of A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, has once again popped her elegant head above the parapet and invited us to kick her teeth in.

A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother,published shortly after the birth of her first child and while she was pregnant with her second, ignited a bonfire of indignation. Just what the midwife didn't order. "I was cited everywhere as having said the unsayable: that it is possible for a woman to dislike her children, even to regret having brought them into the world," Cusk later wrote.

In that book, which still outsells her novels, Cusk rails against her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, snarling babies and sleepless nights, and ultimately attempts to examine the erosion of self when one’s life is tethered to a tiny infant. “I often think that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like,” she writes at one point.

Some readers will never forgive her for pouring a teething cup of cold vomit over motherhood; others find her honesty liberating. In an Observerinterview with Lynn Barber, Cusk describes cycling to school with her daughters while other women hissed abuse at her from their Range Rovers. It would seem, however, that Cusk has remained unfazed by the lipgloss hissers, and those sleek tank drivers certainly didn't dampen her enthusiasm for writing Aftermath, a forensic examination of her experience of separation and divorce after 10 years of marriage to the photographer Adrian Clarke, her children's father.

This new book, although acutely personal, is also somehow intensely private; the reader is certainly not invited into the shorn bed of Cusk’s marriage. Clarke remains fairly anonymous in the book, referred to simply as “my husband”, two unremarkable words that Cusk manages to infuse with Arctic chill, as in: “My husband felt I had treated him monstrously.” Whether she did or didn’t do so remains a mystery; we are not, she makes implicitly clear through the absence of gossip, or blame, entitled to a seat at the theatre of her crumbling union.

It is the notion of aftermath, Cusk is at pains to point out, that is the book’s theme. The etymology of the word is “second mowing”, as in a second crop of grass, seeded and harvested after the main crop is in.

The book is elaborately freighted with metaphor, the most blindingly obvious and least elegant being a somewhat arch description of a molar she has to have removed at around the time her husband and his red canvas shoes move out of their home. The roots of the tooth are gnarled and crooked, clinging to her swollen gum until her defiantly buoyant dentist marries a chisel to his pliers and yanks it out.

Although the details of the marital breakdown are not enumerated, Cusk does attempt to separate the truth of her marriage from the story of her marriage. Like a determined ant intent on carrying a load twice its size, she plunders and rips through the human condition in search of her own truth. Noisily, lustrously, Cusk hurls her prose at the politics of medieval England, at a ship full of ancient Greeks and Romans, and, of course, at feminism, concluding: “I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite.” She even has the energy to round on Christianity, “the holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry”.

Her rage, if it is rage that burns under the ice pool of her prose, is invigorating. It is also exhausting, but just when you feel as if you are listening to the ranting self-supremacy of an overindulged teenager and you’re hoping the book will stalk off, flicking its hair over its shoulder, Cusk falls back on her striking, pristinely observed prose. Her description of her first mournful holiday alone with her daughters, in the English countryside, is like sculpted ice. Insular, vulnerable, rigorous, defiant, Cusk breathes frost and creates moments of beauty.

Ostensibly about the breakdown of a marriage, “like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces”, the book feels more like a journey inwards, an attempt to regain isolation, to repatriate the writer to herself. Maybe, for Cusk, domesticity is the enemy: she managed a decade, curbed her wanderlust, trimmed her peripatetic roots, smoothed her irritation, but there is clearly something about her that will follow the hard road even when she has to go out of her way to find it.

Near the end, Cusk alludes to her weekly visits to an analyst. The first thing she says to him is: “I don’t ever want you to tell me that I think too much. If you say that, I’ll leave.” And, of course, when she describes talking to her analyst about the doctrine of self-love being “a windless primordial swamp”, thinking too much is exactly what you feel she is doing. But Cusk never asks us for our opinion, never sets out to enlist our sympathy, never sidles up to her readers to ask for their approval.

The last chapter of Aftermathreads almost as a short story. Cusk switches point of view and illuminates the dying days of her marriage through the eyes of a vulnerable and damaged young woman from eastern Europe who comes to au pair for Cusk's family. It is a surprisingly moving chapter, raw, elegiac and, ultimately, terribly sad. One leaves this memoir convinced that the loss of Cusk's marriage was somehow inevitable, had already been written; one feels an awareness, even a sympathy, about what, possibly, is her compulsion to break something so that she has the opportunity to examine the pieces.

Hilary Fannin is a playwright and journalist, currently under commission to Rough Magic theatre company