Sam Haddow
posted 5 June 2007

Allow me to be frank at the commencement – I didn’t finish this book. I make this confession as a twofold expositional device – on the one hand, given that I generally find it impossible not to finish books, it should indicate precisely the levels of frustration and annoyance to which this book propelled me. On the other, of course, feel free to discount anything I may say as being from a perspective lacking in completion. Ordinarily, I would loathe saying anything in this latter state, but to be honest, putting this book down and deciding not to pick it up again felt like punching my way out of a coffin.

There is a case to be made that a book like this – one that deals with the constricting ennui of suburban living – should attempt to produce just such a feeling in its reader, in which case Cusk has succeeded admirably. I, however, generally like my fiction to stimulate, rather than bore, frustrate and infuriate, and retain the opinion that, if you want to attack something, you get out of the way of your own weapons.

Set on a single day in a leafy suburb (fill in the blanks, because that’s pretty much all the description you get, Cusk apparently assuming that all her demographic live in Arlington Park anyway, so what’s the point in painting a picture you can see out your kitchen window) Arlington Park focuses on a day in the lives of five supposedly different women. I say supposedly, because except for Christine (don’t get me started – imagine a sort of remedial pastiche of a nineteenth century ‘wench’), the others are all decidedly middle class, lexically identical, and imbued with the sort of bile-splattered, petty malevolence that, if actually encountered in real life, could probably drive the most hardened misandrist in completely the opposite direction.

All right, here’s where I perceive Cusk’s most aspersive crime – she simultaneously trivialises and hyperbolises her subject material. Not an easy feat, admittedly. Her characters are small people with big ideas; fine, except that they shouldn’t be ‘small’ if they’re a supposed cross section of ‘everywomen’ and their ideas are frankly not that big. Little or no indication is given of psychological motivation, the occasional attempts at hyper realism are too inconsistent to be considered narrative drives and so become menial obsessions with contextually starved paraphernalia (haircuts, burgers, kitchens etc)… essentially, I would consider this one of the most misogynistic books written by a woman that I’ve ever read. I was honestly left feeling, after a time, that Cusk hated her characters. Again, not necessarily a terrible thing, but I fail to see how a reader is supposed to take it. Are we to sit back and say ‘Yep, suburbia’s shit, let’s have some tea’? It doesn’t even succeed as a motivational exercise in a kind of ‘now go away and change your life’ way, because it’s so bloody badly written.

Before I’d even started, I knew that when I looked up other reviews, there’d be dear old Ginny Woolf’s name cropping up left, right and centre, along with words like ‘complex’ ‘elegant’ and, in all probability ‘bleak.’ I was right. In every case. I won’t quote them here – just type in ‘Arlington Park reviews’ in Google and you’ll see what I mean.

The comparison with Virginia Woolf comes, as far as I can see, because Cusk has assessed every sentence for maximum ‘staring out into the middle distance in quiet anguish’ effect – something that, at her worst, Ginny was a little prone to. A fun exercise to play with this book is to read the last sentence of every chapter aloud to a friend (once you’ve finished, naturally, unlike me). Again, you’ll see what I mean. Then, there’s the utter lack of class consciousness that I found, as someone who meanders on the borderline between working and middle, frankly insulting. Virginia Woolf, whilst being arguably relevant to a whole host of time periods since, was unquestionably of her own time. Cusk seems to want to be of Virginia’s time, not ours.

‘Complex’ – the notion is hilarious. In an early passage, a fat bald chauvinist pig (yep, it’s that subtle) is described twice, in two lines, as being ‘like a seal’. No, really. As already stated, the character motivations are submerged beneath inch-thick layers of mediocre archetyping, the prose is wrought and clichéd, and the perspective is at best nihilistic, at worst deplorable. After the first few chapters, I was longing for Lionel Shriver to fly over and start providing quick lessons in idiomatic variation and even the most basic notions of motive. Needless to say it didn’t happen.

‘Elegant’ is something Cusk occasionally almost pulls off, but its always overshadowed. A nice passage about a monstrously oversized kitchen that vaguely echoes a Tom Wolfe-style ‘dog-eat-dog-eat-possession’ paranoia is ruined completely by a dreadful internal monologue about personal failure. And that bled into this trivialising, which was eventually the reason I put the book down – I was left thinking ‘why should I care’? The subject matter is not unimportant; certainly, the suffocating passive aggression of suburbia is an extremely pertinent and rich area, but if the writer doesn’t care about the characters, why the hell should we?

And ‘bleak.’ Yep, bleak it certainly is. But not in a good way. (If that sounds oxymoronic, I’d recommend you go and check out the above mentioned Lionel Shriver, or if you’re feeling brave, Toni Morrison). Arlington Park’s bleakness, for me, came because I sat there thinking ‘Life’s too short to read bad books. I’ve just spent three hours trying to read this. I won’t get those three hours back. Why am I still reading?’ So I stopped. And then felt much better.