The Country Life by Rachel Cusk presents several promises, but eventually seems to break most of them. When Stella Benson, a twenty-nine-year-old, leaves home suddenly to take up a private care assistant’s job in darkest south England, it is clear that she is running away. From what we do learn later, but by then we perhaps care rather less about the circumstances.From the start there was a problem with the book’s point of view. Stella presents a first person narrative couched in a conventional past tense. Events – albeit from the past – unfold along a linear time frame, but despite her removed perspective, she apparently never reflects beyond the present she reports. Given Stella’s character, this may be no more than an expression of her scattered immediacy, but that only becomes clear as we get to know her via her actions. This apparent contradiction of perspectives has to be ignored if the book is to work, but once overcome The Country Life is worth the effort.Stella - to say the least – is not a very competent person. But then no-one else in this little southern village seems to have much about them. She becomes a live-in personal carer for Martin Madden, a disabled seventeen-year-old who lives with his rather dotty parents on their apparently luxurious farm. Stella has neither experience, nor presumably references, nor the pre-requisite driving licence. Her employers don’t check anything, despite their reported bad experiences in the past. Thus Stella becomes part of a rather mad family called Madden.Stella steadily learns more about the Maddens. They have their past, both collectively and individually. Pamela, a wiry, sun-tanned matriarch, is married to Piers. They have children, all of whom seem to have inherited different mixes of the foibles on offer. There’s a local scandal or two, rumours of mis-treatment, sexual impropriety and more, but it always seems to dissolve into innuendo. This, perhaps, is the country life. Stella herself is incompetent in the extreme. She gets sunburnt - in England(!), soils her shoes with melted tar from the road, gets drunk several times, falls into the pool, gets lost, cuts up her clothing, behaves inappropriately, steals on demand and can’t find the garden gate. It’s quite a week. As the book progresses, it seems unsure whether it should be a sit-com or a farce.But at the centre of The Country Life is Stella’s developing relationship with Martin. He is used to being the centre of attention and knows how to play the part, how to manipulate. He may, it seems, have inherited much from his mother and perhaps a lot less from his father.The Country Life is beautifully written. It is both funny and engaging. Stella’s life becomes increasingly a farce, however, and this crowds out some of the other themes that might have come more interestingly to the fore. Rachel Cusk’s writing is always fluent, perhaps overdone here and there, but when you are that good at it, a little over-egging just adds to the richness.
I stayed up late to finish this book last night. I’d finally gotten to about page 300 and thought: finally, something is about to happen . . . we’re getting to the point. But alas, no. Literally, when I finished the last page of the book, I turned the page and said: is my book defective? Because it couldn’t possibly end there. But after I checked the page count on Amazon, I realized that it was in fact over. And then I wanted to give a frustrated shriek.The book was an odd one for me. I often have a difficult time getting into a book. In fact, it’s the very rare book that I don’t fight with at least the first 30-50 pages trying to get into it. But when I do, it’s usually next to impossible to get me to set it down before it’s done. The Country Life didn’t get me interested until about 150 pages into it. And I only kept reading because I thought it was a “city girl deals with transformation into country life and this is how it happened” kind of book, which I usually adore. But it wasn’t really a book about that at all.The whole book was about some neurotic, if not actually truly unbalanced, woman who ran away from her life. We’re told that she did it because she saw her life fully mapped out before her and she wanted to escape that. But you never get the feeling that that was it. I think the handicapped charge that she is companion to in the country ultimately hits it on the head toward the end of the book: she’s a coward and she’s selfish. The story starts with Stella, the neurotic escapist, writing some rather scathing letters to people in her soon-to-be former life. And I understood that. I think we’ve all had a moment or two where writing such a letter sounded awfully satisfying. Ms. Cusk makes them deliberately vague so that she has somewhere to take the book later on. But she doesn’t.The whole story is a series of random things that the author mentions once or twice that seem relevant, possibly important to the story, and then she never brings them up again. By the end of the story, I think that Stella is merely a lush and wonder if she is actually going to end up bedding her charge at some point either in a drunken moment or in some contrived situation that sounds unselfish but is in fact the ultimate in selfishness.This book gets two thumbs down from me. A total waste of my time. The writing was sometimes well-done and at others truly horrendous. The plot ebbs and flows along until you realize that there actually is no plot. The story isn’t plausible and by the end, it’s not that you care what happens, you just have a 350 page investment upon which you feel entitled to having something be delivered. Boo.
What do You think about The Country Life (1999)?
This one had a lot of promise in the early going. But there's something about the British vernacular I found annoying in this novel. I read a lot of English authors, and most of their writing is perfectly palatable. There's unnecessary density to Rachel Cusk's writing, which not only sits heavily on the stomach but also gets in the way of comprehension. It slowed the book down to a glacial pace for me. In the early going, the book reminded me of Bridget Jones's Diary. But the madcap quality didn't work as the characters became more noticeably morose. And yet, Cusk kept on piling on the slapstick. My early instinct was to bail out. I should have listened.
—Marguerite
Stella drops everything, leaves everything in London behind, including her job, family and partner, to become a caretaker for an adolescent boy on a wealthy farm in the English countryside. She wants a clean break. All and all there maybe isn't much here, but the language is wonderfully precise and characters are each entertaining in their own dysfunctional ways. I was entertained as Stella narratives every thing and every thought so carefully, precisely and rationally, and yet what she does consistently makes little sense for her or anyone else.
—Daniel Chaikin
This is a funny, rather ridiculous, carefully and uniquely written book--while I didn't love it, I am curious to read more of Cusk's work now, because she is clearly a highly imaginative, somewhat off-kilter writer. Cusk is working here with the fairly established narrative of a young city girl who comes to the country as a governess, and gradually becomes embroiled in the sagas of the wacky provincial folk. What lifts "The Country Life" above its premise is the voice of that young girl, Stella: it gradually becomes clear that she is the ultimate example of the unreliable narrator. Her halting, maddeningly precise, downright odd take on events is, on the one hand, fascinating: how accurate is her telling of events? How mentally stable is she? On the other hand, her minutely detailed asides and explanations can, at times, become pretty darn tiresome. The narration becomes, at times, so knotty and wrapped around itself, that I felt I could barely breathe, let alone get any clear sense of the events at hands. Which, I'm sure, is the author's point. But at times, it all became a bit much. Even so, Cusk certainly knows what she is doing, and does it very well.
—Kristen
