4

Perceptions of Failure in Rachel Cusk’s

Saving Agnes and Second Place
Sonja Pyykkö

Rachel Cusk’s success as an author owes a great deal to her skill at depicting
failure: from the ‘failure extraordinaire’ of Agnes Day, the heroine of her debut
novel Saving Agnes (1994), to M, supposedly the artiste manquée in her latest
novel, Second Place (2021), Cusk’s fiction and memoirs are overflowing with
representations of failure. Failure in Cusk’s writing is figured both as a real threat
– like the crack that spreads slowly across Agnes’s living room wall, signifying ‘a
tiny manifestation of a larger slippage, almost like a gravitational force’ (Cusk
1994: 101) – and as a distortion of self-perception that causes her protagonists,
Agnes and M included, to see themselves as failures even when nobody else
would. Even though such failure-obsessed characters appear with remarkable
predictability in Cusk’s fiction, this chapter’s focus on Saving Agnes with Second
Place reveals differences in how these faulty perspectives function to delude and
entrap those who possess them. In Saving Agnes, Agnes struggles to establish the
kind of self-distance that she needs to rid herself of the belief that even with
nothing outwardly wrong with her, she is an extraordinary failure – a self-
distance, moreover, that seems, at the end of the novel, to promise her success
as an author. In Second Place, by contrast, the middle-aged author M faces a
different problem: M knows perfectly well that her self-perception is distorted,
but this knowledge brings her no closer to freeing her from the vision of seeing
herself as a failure, coming in at ‘second place’. Saving Agnes and Second Place
offer nuanced treaments of failure, not only as a motif – a recurring idea, or idée
fixe – but also as an aesthetic, as a set of principles that govern the novel’s
portrayal of its theme. By recognizing that failure functions as an aesthetic that
only becomes more refined and pronounced when moving from Cusk’s early
novels to her later work, this chapter seeks to contribute to the growing number
of studies exploring Cusk as a ‘neo-modernist’ author, by Nicolas Pierre Boileau

75
76 Rachel Cusk

(2013), Liam Harrison (2022), Ella Ophir (2022) and others. As Matthew Sandler
notes in an essay on Gertrude Stein and ‘failure studies’, it was scholars of
modernism who first suggested that ‘while failure is endemic to modernity, failed
art might provide for aesthetic possibility’ (2017: 191).1 In Second Place, this
chapter contends, it is not failed art, exactly, but a failed artist, M, who reveals the
aesthetic possibility that failure provides in Rachel Cusk’s work – for her novels
to succeed as works of art, their protagonists must fail.

‘Failure Extraordinaire’: Subjectivity and Authorship

in Saving Agnes

Saving Agnes’s first chapter concludes with a comical image of its young female
protagonist shooting around ‘trying to sustain the appearance of a thrusting
young professional running on a tight schedule’ one minute, and the next
revealed for all the world as ‘none other than Agnes Day: sub-editor, suburbanite,
failure extraordinaire’ (Cusk 1994: 12). Not only beauty but also success and
failure lie largely in the eye of the beholder, Cusk indicates by providing her
readers with glimpses into Agnes’s hypercritical self-perception using internal
focalization. Shifting between the subjective and the objective viewpoints
highlights the irony between how others perceive Agnes – a recent Oxford
graduate with a job in publishing, two loving parents, her own life in London,
and a house share with university friends who are just as privileged as she is –
and how Agnes has learned to perceive herself since she was a teenager. This is
when she first became aware of the ‘appellatory misfortune’, the fact that her
name is pronounced the same as ‘Agnus Dei’, Lamb of God, though nobody else
seems to have noticed the coincidence, which had initially given her the
impression that failure was written into her fate: ‘that what would have been a
success by any other name was fast becoming a failure by her own’, and even ‘that
reality meant failure, ugliness and self-contempt’ (Cusk 1994: 13–16). This kind
of comic exaggeration highlights Agnes’s blissful unawareness of how minor

1
The study of failure in the arts is today often associated with the work of Jack Halberstam, who
proposed in The Queer Art of Failure (2011: 88) that failure constitutes a valid response, perhaps the
only valid response, to the techno-optimism and growth mentality that belong integrally to
capitalism. As Sandler notes, however, Halberstam owes this orientation to scholars of modernism,
such as John Berger (1989), Peter Bürger (1984), Suzi Gablik (2004), and Andrew Ross (1986), who
first begun using the notion of failure to explore ‘modernism’s reaction to modernity’ (Sandler
2017: 191).
 Perceptions of Failure in Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes and Second Place 77

her struggles are, but there is more at stake in Saving Agnes than a satire of
the cluelessness of white middle-class youth. This is because it is ultimately
not failure per se, nor even a fear of failure, that Saving Agnes seeks to represent,
but something even more elusive: a distorted self-perception that causes
Agnes to compare herself to an idealized version of herself – ‘Grace’, the alter-ego
she developed as a teenager – which causes Agnes to believe that she has
somehow failed at the simple task of being herself. Reading Saving Agnes as a
Bildungsroman, as this chapter proceeds to, reveals a developmental trajectory
that transforms Agnes into a promising young woman who is learning to observe
herself and her surroundings with greater objectivity – this, Cusk implies, is
a skill that she will need if she is to become an author. At stake in the novel,
I suggest, is the initial development of an authorial subject who possesses a
distinct and unique perspective on the world, but isn’t too trapped in her
subjective field of vision to perceive the universal ‘pattern’ or ‘picture’ that
emerges when her personal failures and private anguish are viewed from the
proper ‘distance’ (1994: 217).
Saving Agnes kickstarted a decades-spanning literary career that made Cusk
one of the most widely acclaimed authors writing in English today. Winner of
the prestigious Whitbread first novel award, it was reviewed in leading
newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, anticipating Cusk’s later international
success. Had Cusk chosen to write her debut in the first-person singular, it might
have more eagerly been interpreted as an autobiographical novel, and perhaps
later as autofiction, but it seems significant that she chose not to do this. Through
a fictional protagonist, whose experience is more representative than individual,
Saving Agnes depicts challenges that young people in general, and particularly
those from a middle-class background, face as they strive to find their place in
society. This is a common theme in the Bildungsroman, also known as a ‘novel
of development’ or a ‘novel of apprenticeship’, which depicts its bourgeois
protagonist’s journey from youth to adulthood as a series of ‘false starts’ that
concludes when the protagonist has become fully adjusted to society’s demands
and is therefore able to become a productive member of it, as Susanna Howe
argued in an early study of the genre (1930: 4). ‘Youth’, Franco Moretti has more
recently observed, ‘acts as a sort of symbolic concentrate of the uncertainties and
tensions of an entire cultural system, and the hero’s growth becomes the narrative
convention or fictio that permits the exploration of conflicting values’ (1987:
185). Through the form of the Bildungsroman, Saving Agnes depicts Agnes’s
struggle to overcome her fear of failure as she begins her first job as an assisting
editor for a weekly newspaper and tries her hand at relationships with various,
78 Rachel Cusk

more or less abusive, boyfriends. By representing Agnes’s plight as a combination

of her private neuroses and of real obstacles standing in the way of young
women trying to succeed, or merely to survive, in a patriarchal society, Saving
Agnes offers a subtly feminist take on failure and femininity in the early 1990s – a
time that has been associated with what feminist critic Susan Faludi (1993)
termed the postfeminist ‘backlash’. The novel also provides a nuanced, class-
conscious portrayal of growing up in a faltering capitalist economy that has
diminishing rewards in store even for the middle classes – the poor of course
have even fewer prospects, though Agnes is yet to discover this disparity at
the novel’s beginning. Visiting her parents’ idyllic country home, an emblem of
bourgeois success, Agnes realizes that ‘she quite possibly might never attain for
herself the standard of living to which her upbringing had accustomed her’, and
that ‘[t]here might come a time, all too soon, when she herself would need to be
saved from the perdition of economic failure’ (Cusk 1994: 82). Eventually she
comes to a different conclusion: ‘For ordinary people, such as herself ’, there
might be no ‘defining moment’, no ultimate failure or success (217), and if
someone is going to be saving her from failure, it ought to be herself: ‘I suppose
I meant that I shouldn’t need to be saved from things. It makes me sound so –
naïve’ (200). The title, Saving Agnes, is thus revealed to be just as ironic as Agnes’s
self-perception at the novel’s beginning. Agnes’s conviction that she constitutes a
‘failure extraordinaire’, and her subsequent belief that she needs a man to save
her from ruin, is what she must overcome before any kind of success –
professional, financial, romantic, artistic – is even possible.
If the traditional Bildungsroman concludes when the Bildungsheld has found
his (or, more rarely, her) station in life, contemporary Bildungsromane do not
take for granted that the hero can or should be finally integrated into society –
nor even that such a thing as ‘society’ even exists, as Michael Patrick Allen has
remarked about the ‘Thatcherite Bildungsroman’ (2020: 2114). Reading Saving
Agnes in this lineage reveals it to be equally if not more concerned with
questioning the integrity of the neoliberal social order than with narrating its
protagonist’s integration into this order. Even in the first chapter, Agnes’s
bourgeois narrative of self-development threatens to collapse when she is forced
to retreat inside the house after an interaction with a homeless man goes awry.
It takes her brother Tom to point out the reason why her gestures of goodwill
backfire with such regularity: ‘You don’t really care about the poor or the
homeless. It’s your fear of failure that’s behind it. If nobody wins, you can’t
lose’ (Cusk 1994: 83). The lessons Agnes eventually learns are more moderate
than Tom’s comment suggests, however. Through repeated encounters with
 Perceptions of Failure in Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes and Second Place 79

others, whose misfortunes far outweigh her own, Agnes realizes that her
problems are laughably minor. In other words, more than empathy or genuine
solidarity, witnessing suffering teaches Agnes perspective. The emblems of this
accumulating perspective in the novel are the mazes – both literal, like the hedge
maze Agnes visits with her boyfriend before he dumps her and figurative, like
the London Underground and bus network, the main interfaces through which
Agnes encounters people outside her social class – in which Agnes gets lost,
wanders and eventually finds her way to the centre of the maze, only to discover
that ‘[t]here was nothing there. It was a hoax, an illusion of significance’ (117).
This cynicism eventually gives way to a more balanced outlook, when Agnes
realizes that the world doesn’t owe her anything, least of all ‘compensation for
daily disappointments and injustices’ (191), and that if she can just stop expecting
that it will, many of her problems will be solved. Not all misfortunes are
imaginary, however, and not every problem can be fixed by a change of attitude,
as Cusk indicates by tracing Agnes’s individualistic narrative of self-development
side-by-side with characters facing very real injustices, including Greta, Agnes’s
friend, colleague and foil, whose cheery optimism fails after she is raped by an
acquaintance, and Annie, an elderly homeless woman whom Agnes is powerless
to help.
A more profound meditation on failure is evident in how Agnes struggles
to distance herself from the neoliberal ideology that causes people like her
brother to see the world as consisting of just ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. ‘What do
you call winning?’ Agnes challenges her financial consultant brother, ‘What
about people who actually do care about things, who reject a system they didn’t
choose in the first place? Are they losers just because they refuse to play
the game?’ (Cusk 1994: 83). Tellingly, these questions are never properly answered
in the novel. What would it mean for Agnes, or anyone, to reject a system
they didn’t choose? Is it possible for Agnes to reject not only her parents’ middle-
class lifestyle, which is moving beyond her reach, but also their bourgeois
ideals, which cause Agnes and her brother to equate success with status
and material wealth? Is Agnes automatically a failure if she rejects marriage,
homeownership, and nuclear family – the emblems of middle-class success?
Even though Agnes struggles with such questions, in the end, she neither rejects
nor fully embraces the bourgeois values of her parents, but rather finds an uneasy
compromise between her desire for autonomy and self-determination and her
need for security and social acceptance. She starts pulling her weight at work,
which leads to a promotion, which allows her to apply for a mortgage to buy the
house she has been renting with friends, which leads to a reconciliation, though
80 Rachel Cusk

one tinged with self-irony, with her parents and their idea of what it means to
succeed: ‘Agnes’s parents had been delighted by this news. It was, they assured
her, the right time in her life to be making such a move’ (212). By portraying
Agnes as she struggles with middle-class ideals and eventually yields to (some
of) them, Cusk implies that it is one thing to learn to notice that the way one
perceives and evaluates oneself and others is not objective but determined by a
variety of factors – including cultural and ideological surroundings, upbringing
and personal experience – and another thing entirely to reject this deeply
ingrained worldview, Weltanschauung, by adopting a different set of values and a
different perspective on life.
Even though Agnes ultimately fails to denounce these ideological trappings,
her development does not simply culminate in becoming a homeowner or
the chief editor of a magazine. Namely, the development that truly matters in
Saving Agnes takes place largely inside Agnes’s mind, having to do with her
self-perception, and is therefore much harder to measure than outward signs
of success, even by Agnes herself: ‘She had changed, she knew, but she didn’t
quite know how or when’ (Cusk 1994: 160). In its very final chapter, Saving Agnes
takes a turn from the Bildungsroman toward the Künstlerroman, the artist’s
novel, by implying that the very last stage of Agnes’s internal development might
be authorship: ‘Her history welled up in her: things burned, frozen, buried alive,
a whole disordered catalogue of stories told or hidden. She alone could make
sense of them. She alone could tell it as it was, for who else would remember?’
(194). Instead of Agnes sitting down to write the novel readers have just finished
reading – a common device in the Bildungsroman (Slaughter 2010: 4) – the
final emphasis on telling implies that a literary career might in some distant
future be within Agnes’s reach. This literary career will centre on realistic
depictions of ordinary life – mundane, daily experiences told as they are – but
from a perspective that renders some of its opaqueness translucent, imposing
order on its chaos. This, at least, is how Cusk seems to imagine authorship at the
end of her debut novel, which finally allows even its confused protagonist a
newfound perspective, a vantage point, from which life could potentially begin to
make sense:
It was just a question of not looking too closely at things. Close up, the mad
weave was bizarre and imageless, but from a distance a pattern could perhaps be
discerned and somewhere within it all that she knew: [. . .] She supposed one
only found out how one compared by looking at the picture. It was the final
result and she would wait for it, as those around her were now waiting.
Cusk 1994: 217
 Perceptions of Failure in Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes and Second Place 81

The equanimity of this conclusion is a far cry from the anguish that has
characterized the novel, implying, perhaps, that the perspective which Agnes
lacked as a character could be remedied by becoming an author. In contrast,
then, to the conclusion of the traditional Bildungsroman, which according to
Joseph Slaughter ‘serves to demonstrate, at least to the protagonist (the
Bildungsheld), that life is meaningful and that apparently random plot events are
actually linked and indispensable for becoming a well-rounded, productive,
member of society’ (2010: 2), Agnes seems perched to discover that the
apparently random events are not but can be linked and that this active
process of plotting her life can counteract the disillusionment and despair that
she has been feeling. Authorship, Saving Agnes implies, marks the ultimate
success, the ultimate victory, over life itself. Revealing a ‘pattern’ from ‘the mad
weave’ of existence, writing is what allows recognizable forms to emerge out of
the formless mass of experience. All that Agnes needs is to have a little patience
– time will take care of the rest, and eventually the ‘picture’ is revealed. Published
twenty-eight years and thirteen books after Saving Agnes, Second Place comes to
the opposite conclusion.

Second Sex: Failure and the Female Artist in Second Place

While the theme of authorship is present in a latent form already in Saving

Agnes, it only becomes a central concern in Cusk’s work after the ambivalent and
frequently hostile reception of her memoirs, A Life’s Work (2001) and Aftermath
(2012). In these memoirs, Cusk experimented with using her own life – her own
‘failures’ as a mother, as a wife, and perhaps as a woman (see Garrett 2021: 95) –
as the raw material that could be rendered in literary form, thus placing herself
in a lineage of failing female characters that had begun with Agnes, and continued
with The Temporary’s (1995) Francine, The Country Life’s (1997) Stella, and the
disappointed and dispirited women of Arlington Park (2006). According to
Cusk’s admission, the virulent attacks against her person that followed the
memoirs with autobiographical writing were what motivated her to begin the
formal experimentation that eventually produced Outline (2014), her most
celebrated novel to date, and a result of her being failed by the memoir as a form
of art (see Kellaway 2014). Kudos (2018), the final part of the Outline trilogy that
secured Cusk’s reputation as an international literary sensation, fixes a ruthlessly
analytical eye to success and failure in the field of literature. In Second Place, this
82 Rachel Cusk

criticism becomes self-reflexive, even self-devouring: in it, the artist whose

aesthetic merit is being judged harshly is Cusk herself.
Cusk had promised in an interview that Kudos would be reaching ‘toward
termination and vanishing’ (Julavits 2015), but the image she leaves readers with
is not of a woman about to vanish, let alone be vanquished. Lulling in a darkened
ocean while holding eye contact with a man who is urinating belligerently in her
direction, the narrator refuses to look away from the scene of her humiliation: ‘I
looked into his cruel, merry eyes, and I waited for him to stop’ (Cusk 2018: 232).
Kudos’s final sentence doubles as an announcement of the masochistic theme
that preoccupies Second Place, where the promised journey to ‘termination and
vanishing’ comes into focus. In this novel, we find a middle-aged woman author,
identified only as M, who is trapped by her own, hypercritical intellect. Despite
suspecting that her judgement may be governed by a sexist double standard, M
struggles to overcome this bias on her own, and, ironically, decides to enlist the
help of a man, a painter identified only as L, to help her in bringing this final
liberation about.
Second Place begins when M invites L to join her and her husband Tony at
the annex called ‘the second place’ that they have renovated on Tony’s land.
The true reason for the invitation is M’s hope that the famous artist’s presence
will act as a catalyst for the liberating, creative transformation that she yearns
for but cannot articulate – though M’s letters to L fail to mention this. It is only
retrospectively, in the letters that M writes to a mysterious Jeffers after the
whole ordeal is over, which constitute the novel’s text, that she is able to
reflect on her desires and actions. Learning at one point through an intermediary
that L has vowed to ‘destroy’ her (Cusk 2021: 123), M surprises everyone
by welcoming the prospect: ‘The thing was, Jeffers, part of me wanted to be
destroyed, even as I feared that a whole reality would collapse along with
it’ (ibid.). While M’s confessional narration and the novel’s pronounced
symbolism combine to make Second Place an ideal candidate for psychoanalytic
interpretation, such a reading risks missing the radical aesthetic critique
embedded in the novel’s form. Describing this form requires some effort,
however, because like much experimental and avant-garde fiction, Cusk’s latest
novel evades exact definition. Even though M shares some of Cusk’s biographical
details – both are white, middle-aged, female authors of a vaguely middle-class
background who have left the country of their birth and are mothers to at least
one child – Second Place is not a work of autofiction. Rather, it seems to offer
another possible answer to the formal problem that has occupied Cusk since
Outline, which Ella Ophir has described as an experiment in ‘what the novel,
 Perceptions of Failure in Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes and Second Place 83

the extended, imaginative prose narrative of social experience, brought to the

edge of its unmaking, can still genuinely and profitably do’ (2022: 2). The
solution Second Place offers to this formal problem is a complex one. In an
endnote, Cusk mentions that her novel owes a ‘debt’ to another work, which she
briefly identifies as Lorenzo in Taos. This title belongs to a 1923 memoir by
Mable Dodge Luhan (M), an American patron of the arts, who describes
through a series of letters that she addressed to her friend, the poet Robinson
Jeffers (Jeffers), the events that took place after D. H. Lawrence (L) accepted her
invitation to join herself and her Native American husband Tony (Tony) on the
ranch that they owned in the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. In a manner that
recalls Joyce’s transposition of ‘the action of Odyssey to twentieth-century
Dublin’ in Ulysses (Genette 1997: 5–6), Cusk has transposed the events that
were recorded in Luhan’s memoir from a century earlier to the present-day
United Kingdom. It would be equally misleading to think of Second Place as a
work of ‘biofiction’, because it is not only the characters and the main line of
action but all the major elements – characters, plot, theme, epistolary structure,
and even style, including the exclamation points that punctuate M’s letters to
Jeffers – originate in Luhan’s memoir. In this sense, Cusk has gone even further
than Joyce in her act of literary reappropriation. Instead of ‘disqualifying’
Second Place as a novel, this reappropriation recalls a famous definition of the
novel as having a ‘cannibal capacity to ingest a wide range of literary genres,
modes, and forms’ (Cooppan 2018: 23). Crucially, in Second Place the
reappropriated, ‘ingested’ material has been rearranged to form a work of art
that exists in a derivative relation, ‘second place’, to another work that came
before it.
Even though the formal premise of Second Place is more convoluted than
Saving Agnes’s, in comparison a relatively traditional coming-of-age novel, M
does resemble Agnes in that she also thinks of herself as a failure. But whereas
Agnes eventually learned to view herself in a different, more forgiving light, M
realizes that her self-perception is skewed – and also that there is little she can do
about it:

I said to him that ‘second place’ pretty much summed up how I felt about myself
and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory
but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I
could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the
reason I couldn’t seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was
powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome.
Cusk 2021: 145
84 Rachel Cusk

Where Agnes thought that it was her name that destined her to failure, M’s
belief clearly has something to do with her gender, though the relationship
between failure and femininity is established primarily through the highly
ambivalent addition, ‘as the woman I was’. This qualifier offers two possible
interpretations: It can be taken to mean that to be a woman means to exist in
relation to another who must always come first, like Genesis depicts God
creating Adam and only fashioning the woman, Eve, as a kind of afterthought
to keep him company; or that to be a woman means to be powerless to alter
one’s destiny whatever that may be. It is in this context, which links femininity
with failure, that we can understand M’s confession, already noted above,
that a ‘part of me wanted to be destroyed’ (124). Even though M is initially
unable to articulate what exactly the ‘part’ in question would be, it has occurred
to her that she needs L’s help in getting rid of it; that she ‘needed violence, the
actual destruction of the ailing part’, and something in L’s threat to destroy her
‘seemed to promise’ this (124). A little later, M can give a fuller account of what
the ‘part’ is that she is trying to destroy. ‘I don’t exist to be seen by you’, she now
tells L, ‘so don’t delude yourself on that point, because I’m the one who’s trying
to free myself how you see me’ (132). The ‘part’ that M wants to have destroyed
by L – what she calls the ‘the ailing part’ – is the ‘part’ of her that exists to be
seen by him and that causes her to see herself as a failure, destined to an eternal
‘second place’.
What the phrase ‘second place’ therefore evokes in the novel is not any real
inferiority but the idea – critiqued by Simone de Beauvoir in Second Sex ([1949]
1956) – of woman as ‘an “imperfect man”, an “incidental” being’ (1956: 15). Even
though Second Sex is not explicitly named in Cusk’s novel, there are grounds to
argue that it functions as the novel’s other main subtext – a counterpoint to the
rigid ideas about femininity that pervade Luhan’s memoir. Throughout the
novel, M makes multiple observations that evoke de Beauvoir’s theses without
directly referring to her. ‘Not to have been born in a woman’s body was a piece
of luck in the first place’ (Cusk 2021: 65, emphasis mine) is the most obvious
link in the string of allusions that evoke the idea of a ‘natural’ order of the sexes
that was critiqued in Second Sex while also linking it with Cusk’s own title. The
cumulative effect of these allusions to women as the ‘second sex’ is not to
strengthen M’s disparaging self-estimation, however, but to undermine and
subvert it. We can see this subversion enacted by comparing the above statement
with M’s earlier confession that femininity felt like ‘borrowed finery, and
sometimes downright impersonation’, that she had ‘never felt all that womanly
in the first place’, and that there were even parts of her that feel ‘male’ to her (12,
 Perceptions of Failure in Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes and Second Place 85

emphasis mine). These two claims about femininity are linked by the figure of
speech ‘in the first place’ that connects them with the titular phrase, ‘second
place’, and with de Beauvoir’s title, ‘second sex’. The opposition they evoke
between (biological) sex and (socially constructed) gender remains unresolved
in the novel, however: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ de
Beauvoir famously wrote (1956: 273) – but M is both ‘born in a woman’s body’
and becomes a woman through the kind of iterative performance of femininity
described by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1999: 180). What M is trying to
free herself from, moreover, is not womanhood per se, but rather, as she tells L,
‘from how you see me’ and to do so by destroying the ‘part’ of her in which these
ideas and ways of seeing reside (Cusk 2021: 132). The problem is that there is
no such ‘part’ that could simply be ‘destroyed’ in the human body, male or
female. By depicting M’s struggle to break free from the culture that made her
who she is, the culture that surrounds and sustains her as an author, Second
Place reveals why, after centuries of feminist campaigning, we have not yet
succeeded in abolishing gender inequality. For the novel to succeed in its
attempt to portray this profound challenge – one that M is not alone in facing
– its protagonist must necessarily fail in her individual liberation. Conversely,
were M to succeed in liberating herself from the effects of patriarchal culture,
Second Place would have failed in representing the radical challenge that
feminism still faces today.
The relationship between L and M undergoes a similar destabilization that
centres on their artistic abilities. At first, it seems as if the two artists, one male,
the other female – who are moreover identified only by initials that reproduce
the hierarchy, with l coming directly before m in the alphabet – confirm the idea
of women as a ‘second sex’. L is a world-famous painter; M publishes rarely and
has a limited readership. Yet no sooner is this opposition evoked than it is
revoked, with M increasingly accumulating masculine characteristics through
confessions such as the ones cited above, while L becomes increasingly associated
with the feminine – to the point that out of the two middle-aged artists, it is the
male one who undergoes menopause in the novel. When L attributes his bad
mood to what he euphemistically refers to as ‘the change’, Brett finds the idea
ridiculous, but to M ‘it seemed [. . .] like something that might well happen to a
creative artist, where a loss or alteration in the sources of potency had occurred’
(Cusk 2021: 86). Through the double-meaning word ‘potency’, the change that
L is undergoing becomes linked with a web of ideas that connect creativity with
the male sex (-organ). What L is experiencing, moreover, is not limited to a
change in his relative position in the symbolic order because of his ageing.
86 Rachel Cusk

Rather, the symbolic order itself seems to be undergoing a restructuring.

Formerly a heavyweight in the art world, L has recently discovered that other
artists have eclipsed his reputation: ‘Some of them happen to be younger than
him’, Brett explains to M, ‘and a different colour, and a couple of them are actually
women’ (86–7) – a comment that exposes M’s feminism as the de Beauvoirian,
second-wave brand that is today sometimes disparagingly called white feminism.
Whatever cultural change this restructuration promises comes too late for M,
however, who is fixed in her conviction that compared to L, she is inferior as an
artist:

This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the
artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his intentions. The rest of
us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly
we imagined it.
Cusk 2021: 32–3

The phrase ‘ordinary person’ echoes Saving Agnes’s conviction that even with
nothing outwardly wrong with her, she is an ‘extraordinary’ failure. Now, the
tables have turned, as M is trapped by a field of vision in which true artists are
extraordinary – but she can never be that.
The reason M believes that L is an artist while she is something else – a ‘writer’,
perhaps – is determined by what, in M’s opinion, constitutes art: ‘True art means
seeking to capture the unreal’, she writes in one of her letters (Cusk 2021: 180).
By contrast, M believes that she only possesses the ‘more common ability to read
the surface of life’ (54). This ability sounds very much like the skill that Agnes
was just starting to develop at the end of Saving Agnes, but in Second Place the
exact same ability signifies failure instead of success. Being able ‘to read the
surface of life’ may still yield a victory over the sheer chaos of living, but it is not
enough to command respect in a world that devalues artists who represent
ordinary life, at least according to M. But if M is wrong about herself, as Agnes
was, perhaps she is also wrong about what constitutes ‘true art’? After all, L first
became a sensation when he painted a series of gruesomely realistic works
representing animal carcasses – an autobiographical theme for a painter whose
childhood home adjoined the slaughterhouse owned by his parents: ‘I wonder
whether this explains L’s failure to ever hit quite the right note with the critics
again, since they expected him to go on shocking them, when in fact he had been
introspective all along’, M muses (53), indicating that she might not be an
unreliable critic of others’ work. If it isn’t the ‘unreal’ that counts, however, then
some other criteria must be used to determine whose realities are considered
 Perceptions of Failure in Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes and Second Place 87

worth representing in a work of art – in L’s case, the ultraviolent, hypermasculine,

‘shocking’ reality of a slaughterhouse, which is a far cry from the suppressed
despair of the bourgeois home that Second Place, like most of Cusk’s novels,
depicts. Readers know almost nothing about the books that M writes, by contrast,
not even if they are novels or memoirs or poetry, and what little we do know
comes from M herself, whose judgement we now know to be influenced by
the sexist standards she is futilely trying to free herself from:

My little books, as he called them, had indeed made hardly any money, partly
because they presented themselves to me so infrequently, and only when life had
taken an ethical shape by which I had to be thoroughly broken down before I
could assume that shape myself in words.
Cusk 2021: 107

Infrequency aside – Cusk herself is a prolific writer, who publishes a book every
few years – M’s books do somewhat resemble Cusk’s both thematically and
aesthetically, presenting ruthlessly clinical dissections of ordinary middle-class
lives directly after disaster has struck. These books, M believes, are not ‘true’
works of art, not in the way that L’s paintings are – but readers may also choose
to question M’s judgement, as they are increasingly invited to do while reading.
M’s other claim – that success when one is still in one’s twenties can ‘distort the
flow of experiences and misshape the personality’ (53) – raises the question of
whether L might be a truer self-portrait of the author as an ageing artist than M.
In neither case is the portrait a flattering one.
Because of the novel’s creative reappropriation of Luhan’s memoir, however, it
is difficult to identify Cusk’s own position in this critique of aesthetic double
standards, which seems to condemn women artists, particularly those interested
in depicting the domestic lives of white middle-class women, to a ‘second place’.
What these formal evasions show is, perhaps, that Cusk has not quite forgotten
the virulent attacks against her person when she dared criticize cultural norms
relating to motherhood, femininity, and marriage in her memoirs. M’s statement,
for instance, that ‘[t]rue art means seeking to capture the unreal’, is originally put
forward by Luhan, who insists throughout Lorenzo in Taos that, unlike Lawrence,
she is not an artist, ‘Since I do not know how to invent anything, I could never
write about anything except myself and what I saw’ (Luhan 1933: 121). In fact,
this was the reason that Luhan invited Lawrence to Taos in the first place: ‘To
take my experience, my material, my Taos, and to formulate it all into a
magnificent creation. That was what I wanted him for’ (77). Similarly, M originally
invited L to stay because she hoped that L would feel moved to paint the marsh
88 Rachel Cusk

landscape that she had spent years contemplating, and that, in doing so, he might
finally be able to answer its ‘conundrum’ (Cusk 2021: 17). But Lawrence never
did write a novel about the Taos pueblo, and when L arrives, he begins painting
a series of portraits instead of the landscape M had been wishing for. The
experience Luhan and M had been hoping Lawrence and L to capture for them
is given expression, however, in the letters that they write to another man, the
absent ‘Jeffers’, or, as it might be more accurate to say, in the memoirs that Luhan
and M write under the guise of the epistolary device. The real author, Cusk,
meanwhile, stays safely tucked away behind the scenes, pulling the strings as M
confesses with Luhan’s voice, incriminating herself as both the victim and the
perpetrator of a hopelessly sexist double standard that fixes her position in an
eternal ‘second place’ relative to L.
Unlike readers of Saving Agnes, who perceive Agnes both from within and
from without, readers of Second Place are trapped inside the perspective whose
limitations they are subtly invited to consider. Despite this formal difference, we
can no more trust M’s insistence that she is doomed to an eternal ‘second place’
than we could trust Agnes’s insistence that she is a ‘failure extraordinaire’. Second
Place encourages readers to eventually extend this same judgement to the novel
itself – to Second Place as a work of art. The main effect of repeated references to
the titular phrase, ‘second place’, within the text is to include the idea of the novel
in its textual machinery so that it can become the artwork that is being judged
through M’s perspective. Because this perspective is faulty – and readers must
first learn to recognize it as such, as they did when reading Saving Agnes – Second
Place expects its readers to not only become aware of the double standard but to
become aware of it in themselves, in their reading of the novel. The readers who
are unable or unwilling to make this move are forced to witness a work of art
devour itself alive, subjecting itself to a criticism that is intended to annihilate it.
In hindsight, Cusk did issue a warning in Kudos: ‘The self-destructive novel, like
the self-destructive person, was something from which in the end you remained
helplessly separated, forced to watch a spectacle – the soul turning on itself – in
which you were powerless to intervene’ (2018: 182).

Conclusion: The Artist of Failure

Where does this leave Cusk as an artist? What are readers supposed to think
about Cusk’s creative capabilities relative to Agnes, to M and Luhan, the two
 Perceptions of Failure in Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes and Second Place 89

‘failed’ artists, and even relative to L, the creative success who supposedly embodies
the ‘true’ artist? Is Cusk, too, a failed artist, an artiste manquée, because, like Agnes
and M, her art consists of ‘read[ing] the surface of life’ – and not just any life, but
the privileged lives of heterosexual, white, middle-class women? On the contrary.
In Second Place, Cusk is setting herself a challenge that she has no intention of
losing. Its dark fantasy world ‘capture[s] the unreal,’ thus distinguishing Cusk
from M and Luhan, the ‘mere’ writers. Even L, supposedly the ‘true’ artist, pales in
comparison to Cusk: she is the author responsible for creating L, whose artistry,
like Cusk’s own, is proven by his ability to reinvent himself every few years, and
whose talent, again like Cusk’s, is recognized also by those who dislike or
disapprove of his brutalist aesthetic – yet another very Cusk-like characteristic.
On the other hand, the question of M’s self-perception remains open: is she a
failed artist, or is she wrong about herself? Her letters are the only way to judge
her talent, but even they are not really hers, carrying, as they do, the insignias of
Luhan’s over-emphatic style – a far cry from Cusk’s usual, pared-down, ‘austere’
minimalism (Vermeulen 2021). In the end, this matters little, because the point of
reading Second Place is not to decide which one of the characters acts as the
author’s self-portrait – in one way, they all do – but to become aware of and begin
to question the criteria we use to evaluate works of art. How do we judge art if
judging it only by aesthetic criteria is impossible? The only way to judge a novel,
or any work of art, Cusk seems to be suggesting in Second Place, is by asking
whether it succeeds or fails in what it is trying to do: whether it manages to
adequately represent the thing that it tries to represent, even or especially when it
is not immediately clear what this is. In both Saving Agnes and Second Place, the
protagonists’ failures are more instructive than their successes: what is at stake in
both novels is an attempt to represent the difficulty of liberating oneself from the
judgement that society – parents, siblings, friends, lovers, critics and other artists
– passes on one. Because capturing this difficulty is only possible if the protagonists
fail in their own attempts to break free, their personal failures pave the way for the
author’s artistic success.

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