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Arlington Park Kindle Edition
Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. Theirs is a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties.
Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents.
Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is her best yet. Full of compassion and wit, each page laden with truth, she writes about her characters' domestic lives, their private thoughts and fears with an intelligence and insight that will leave readers reeling.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFaber & Faber
- Publication date9 Dec. 2010
- File size1415 KB
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Review
"Everything about Arlington Park is original and fearless." --Francine Prose, Bookforum
"Hideously funny . . . A novel with a sense of rightness at its core and a narrative intelligence so swift and piercing it can take your breath away." --The Boston Globe
"Her books are smart and deep, telling tales of urban life that are the twenty-first-century version of Austen or Thackeray. . . . Cusk's depictions and evaluations are spot-on, her language smooth and enthralling." --Baltimore Sun
"Cusk's glory is her style, cold and hard and devastatingly specific, empathetic but not sympathetic." --Los Angeles Times
"Cusk's frank acknowledgment of maternal ambivalence is rare and wonderful." --Entertainment Weekly
"Sharp wit and commanding prose." --The New York Times
"Devastating . . . Incisively vivid." --Publishers Weekly
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
Het tegendeel lijkt eerder het geval. Juliet heeft besloten zich tegen de afwezigheid van de mannen in het gezinsleven te verzetten. Amanda stort zich op het huishouden om haar dwangmatige gedachten aan de dood te verdringen. Solly herontdekt haar vrouwelijkheid bij een Italiaanse kamerhuurder en Maisie is de wanhoop nabij door het besef dat alle schoonheid onherroepelijk zal vergaan. Al deze kwetsbare levens worden in de loop van één regenachtige dag overzien en becommentarieerd door Christine, wier verstoorde maar spitsvondige geest door Arlington Park rondwaart.
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B004G8QI1M
- Publisher : Faber & Faber; Open market ed edition (9 Dec. 2010)
- Language : English
- File size : 1415 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 260 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 135,493 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 4,232 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- 20,805 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)
- 53,128 in Whispersync for Voice
- Customer reviews:
About the author
![Rachel Cusk](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/5155huVPOKL._SY600_.jpg)
Rachel Cusk is the author of nine novels, three non-fiction works, a play, and numerous shorter essays and memoirs. Her first novel, Saving Agnes, was published in 1993. Her most recent novel, Kudos, the final part of the Outline trilogy, will be published in the US and the UK in May 2018.
Saving Agnes won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Country Life won the Somerset Maugham Award and subsequent books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Whitbread Prize, Goldsmiths Prize, Bailey’s Prize, and the Giller Prize and Governor General’s Award in Canada. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. Her version of Euripides’ Medea was directed by Rupert Goold and was shortlisted for the Susan Blackburn Smith Award.
Rachel was born in Canada in 1967 and spent her early childhood in Los Angeles before moving to the UK in 1974. She studied English at Oxford and published her first novel Saving Agnes when she was twenty six, and its themes of femininity and social satire remained central to her work over the next decade. In responding to the formal problems of the novel representing female experience she began to work additionally in non-fiction. Her autobiographical accounts of motherhood and divorce (A Life’s Work and Aftermath) were groundbreaking and controversial.
Most recently, after a long period of consideration, she attempted to evolve a new form, one that could represent personal experience while avoiding the politics of subjectivity and literalism and remaining free from narrative convention. That project became a trilogy (Outline, Transit and Kudos). Outline was one of The New York Times’ top 5 novels in 2015. Judith Thurman’s 2017 profile of Rachel in The New Yorker comments “Many experimental writers have rejected the mechanics of storytelling, but Cusk has found a way to do so without sacrificing its tension. Where the action meanders, language takes up the slack. Her sentences hum with intelligence, like a neural pathway.”
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the writing quality good and the book a comment on modern life. However, they feel the characters lack depth and are poorly portrayed.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers like the writing quality. They say it's well-written and reflects how we live today.
"...So finely written it brings to mind Dickens' foggy opening to Bleak House, the structure and pace of the language she uses echo it closely...." Read more
"...Unfortunately it did not live up to the hype. Yes, it's well written, and yes it's a comment on how we live now...." Read more
"Superb writer..." Read more
Customers dislike the characters and characterizations. They find the book full of terrible characters.
"This is a dreadful book, full of dreadful characters and characterizations...." Read more
"...Hard to feel sympathy for the characters when so many were frankly unpleasant...." Read more
"...don't give up on books but this one is so boring and the characters have no depth. I would not recommend it." Read more
"Although cleverly constructed, this book does not have a single sympathetic character. I was counting down the pages to the end." Read more
Top reviews from United Kingdom
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 November 2013The book is like my expectation. I've bough it for a class lesson and I liked to read it. I recommande it!
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 January 2025The first chapter, which is maybe two pages on a lovely area in rain justifies this alone. So finely written it brings to mind Dickens' foggy opening to Bleak House, the structure and pace of the language she uses echo it closely. The quality of the writing in the book never falters and the resonance of the whole thing hangs in the air. You will fight with her view of women, you're meant to wrestle with it I think. It seems to have no real plot. It's a day in the life...' of Arlington Park, of some people in the area. Nevertheless a beautiful novel. But, be warned, it stings periodically.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 September 2010This is my first encounter with the writing of Rachel Cusk although this is her sixth novel and was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. The novel opens with rain and a dreary ambiance which persists in permeating the whole text. This is a story about a day in the life of five 30-something married women, detailing all the humdrum activities with which they fill their hours - manic morning getting the kids to school, grocery shopping, coffee at the local shopping mall, cooking and cleaning, vapid dinner party conversation.
Juliet is a part-time teacher married to Benedict, a pleasant English teacher but she is seething with resentment at what her life has become
All men are murderers, Juliet thought. All of them. They murder women. They take a woman and, little by little, they murder her.
Solly, perpetually pregnant, lives her life vicariously through the lives of the single female lodgers who rent a room in her home. Christine, as uptight and taut as a rubber band, realises how rubbish her life is but is determined to plough on through it. Amanda, with her pristine, spotless house and beige carpets, just wants to be in control. Maisie, newly arrived from London, is finding it hard to fit into her new life.
Rachel Cusk is undoubtedly a very gifted and elegant writer. This is a very well written novel although sometimes it felt a bit "over-written" and the author's hand became too obvious. She takes the minutiae of domestic life and elevates them with beautiful, lyrical prose. One could be forgiven for wondering if feminism has made any mark on society, given how shackled and unhappy these women appear - none of them are content with their lot, they seem to live life on a knife edge, teetering from one hour to the next, motherhood has been more of a curse rather than a blessing to them. Are men and women truly equal especially if the mother stays at home to look after the children and the home?
I, myself, am a stay at home mum but if my experience ever matched any of Cusk's characters I think I'd just give up! This is not an uplifting book and I am sure that the characters' unrelenting misery matches that of some people's experiences but personally, I found the doom and gloom relentless and whilst I don't have to like characters in order to enjoy a book, the overall air of pessimism, frustration, self-victimization and self-pity ended up enraging rather than engaging me. I'm still keen to explore more of Cusk's novels and will read Saving Agnes soon.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 June 2022This is a dreadful book, full of dreadful characters and characterizations. I suspect Cusk is an admirer of Knausgaard but unfortunately her prose doesn't engage as his does. Considering the focus of the novel is an English suburb (and its' apparently despicable inhabitants) and environs, it is so badly drawn that my mind keeps flipping the picture to a US setting. (The name Arlington doesn't help in this regard).
And what's with all the sour and demented females? It all leaves a very unpleasant taste and this might well become one of very few books I've failed to finish.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 December 2007Having read the reviews (both on this site, on the book cover and in the press) I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately it did not live up to the hype. Yes, it's well written, and yes it's a comment on how we live now. However, it's such a 'glass half empty' book that it feels like a long slog to the end. If you want to read about a bunch of privileged women complaining bitterly about their lives then perhaps this book is for you. For me, it covers no new territory and has a serious sense of humour failure. What it does achieve, however, is to make you feel very glad that you are not in the well-heeled shoes of the women of Arlington Park.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 December 2019This is like a precursor to her trilogy to come - outline, transit, kudos. The lives of women as mothers living in suburbia, pretty much asking themselves what is this all about, and why is it I’m the who does all the laundry and cooking while you swan off to play golf or preen yourself in the mirror. No plot as such, but that is not necessary or the point. Good read, some great insights and brilliant writing but not as good as the trilogy
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 May 2012I love the way Rachel Cusk writes - she manages to sketch so perfectly all those little moments that mostly remain unsaid and unseen and yet define your day. With so many mothers out there i find it strange that i have not stumbled across more books that write about the state of motherhood as truthfully and seriously as this - far too many treat the subject either with general hilarity or with saintly preciousness. One reviewer seems disappointed with the fact that a feminist is still writing about domestic issues. Well, given that becoming a mother often ends up being one of the most defining aspects of a woman's life, i can;t think of a more important topic to write about. Was it Anais Nin who said that men give up everything for their art and women give up everything for their children? Writers have dissected the depressing aspects of all other kinds of relationships, why not those of becoming a parent? And while it is only an angle, given how common postnatal depression is, and indeed depression in general, i think it is an important one to explore. I also couldn't help wondering if this is just the English experience of motherhood as the bleakness of the English landscape seems to permeate all her books - perhaps people who live in countries full of sunshine and close extended families wouldn;t be able to relate at all..! Whatever, I think Cusk is truly gifted and would hate to invite her to dinner - scarily perceptive and observant.
Top reviews from other countries
- sueReviewed in Australia on 26 September 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars I
Intensely insightful in a glass half empty lens. I wanted yo know what the guss was about with Rachel Cusk (Annabrl Crabb). I thought Outine was superior snd pretentious but loved Arlington Park .
- Laura S.Reviewed in the United States on 14 August 2007
5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting, innovative - she deserves a Booker Prize nomination!
I am surprised at the lacklustre ratings this book has received on Amazon. Saying it's dismal or bleak really misses the finer points of this riveting novel. So much modern fiction is fluffy, gimmicky and disappointing, barely memorable an hour after you've finishing reading it. Like Cusk's other work, this book is rich, unpredictable and substantial, and it cuts deep. I will remember it for a long time. Rachel Cusk is one of the best writers (male or female) writing today, and she truly deserves to be nominated for the Booker Prize. Cusk is far more talented, original and socially relevant than many other British and American novelists who are receiving the awards and accolades. This, her latest book, is an unflinching portrait of the dark underbelly of hyprocrisies and secrets of classism, marriage, parenthood and suburban life in Britain today (and could easily apply to certain enclaves of the U.S.)... all done with fine, flourishing touches of dark humour that are distinctly her own. It is a brilliant novel of social commentary for the 21st century.
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IribreeReviewed in France on 22 January 2014
3.0 out of 5 stars Très bien écrit
Ces "desperate housewives" sont à la longue un peu décevantes mais le roman est bien écrit, certaines images sont remarquables et trottent encore dans la tête après fermeture du livre
- W. McFarlandReviewed in the United States on 3 June 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars I have a new understanding of Rachel Cusk and she is now a favorite. "The novel is a rewriting of the Virginia ...
Shared with several friends after reading "Outline." Not a huge fan initially of "Outline" but after researching the author and reading this one, I have a new understanding of Rachel Cusk and she is now a favorite. "The novel is a rewriting of the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway. Set in a single day in suburban England, the book chronicles the minor victories and tragedies of a group of middle-class families. In the characters preparations for a dinner party the book explores the thoughts and actions of each person."
- deceased April 25, 2014Reviewed in the United States on 6 February 2007
2.0 out of 5 stars Arlington Park
I did not like the book at all. In fact, I haven't finished it and probably won't.