'On Coventry': An Introduction

“Her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.” (‘On Natalia Ginzburg’ 242). Cusk wrote this of Natalia Ginzburg in 2018, yet her words apply aptly to her own writing. She lays down the narrative through which we wander, as if through the “coastal paths” that “wind amongst…the sensual and unearthly [trees]...like headless bodies held in curious, balletic poses” (‘Coventry’ 32). We pause to admire these frozen structures, the well-crafted sentences, the stark, bony metaphors, illuminated by Cusk’s consistently matter-of-fact tone. The path stretches on; Cusk moves aside the brambles in this new territory. Yet in our tour of Coventry, we have but one thing in our subconscious. What we most often covet, as readers and as humans, is the innate search for understanding: the thoughts of another suddenly clicking into place to form a new, glimmering reality.

Coventry spins its own narrative through ruminative personal essays, meta-writing on the nature of creation, and literary analyses of ‘Classics and Bestsellers’. Each piece reveals another critical aspect about the author who ties them all together. I have been an avid follower of Cusk’s work from her debut novel, Saving Agnes (1993), to her critically acclaimed Outline trilogy (2014), which “reinvents the novel” (Thurman). But Cusk is no stranger to resistance: her memoir, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012), sparked intense discourse among modern-day feminists, from which a hot and simmering backlash emerged. Regardless of whether one agrees with her ideas, Cusk should never be underestimated. Coventry challenges and provokes, delving into the nuances of topics such as family, feminism, and social scripts. Cusk juxtaposes personal anecdotes with literary allusions to reach insightful conclusions about the human experience, creating a new form of narrative. Enriching her argument with unconventional figurative language, Cusk maintains the dedicated, relentless pursuit of her own truth.

Throughout this collection, Cusk dips in and out of story snippets, whose exposed carcass she spreads out for dissection, belly-up, on the surgical table. ‘Driving as Metaphor’ details the different driver personalities as a naturalist may list the species of butterfly in the Amazonian jungle, from “the slow drivers [who] often fail effectively to communicate their intentions and aims” to those who “drive as it were sanctimoniously, as though to teach the rest of us a lesson.” (4). Cusk writes with an irreverent but focused conversationality that soon becomes characteristic of her prose. She does not shy away from everyday idioms (“teach the rest of us a lesson”), further lending her writing style a disinhibited, intellectual stream-of-consciousness quality. She ponders the logic behind the personas she describes; in the case of the slow driver, she hazards, “A person who slows down at every junction or side road, for example, can be guessed to be looking for a turning but unsure of where it is.” (4). She showcases the acuity of her perception even for the most mundane of daily actions, both impressing us and prompting our further thought on our often skimmed-over habituations.

These ‘universal experiences’ are then neatly summarized in a concise, pithy remark whose humor is rooted, as most humor is, in its stark relatability: “Equally, a person traveling by bicycle feels an antipathy towards cars, yet once inside a car can immediately become irritated by cyclists, and as a pedestrian could dislike them both, sometimes all in the course of a single day” (Cusk, ‘Driving as Metaphor’ 9). We consider ourselves to be the highway’s uniquely blameless operator; Cusk lays our obvious fallacy bare, but the vague sense of shame that arises dissolves in the face of mutual wrongdoing. Skilfully, Cusk manipulates us into following her line of reasoning in this opening essay. Her almost scientific observations command respect; this precise language entices us. One may even feel certain unease mingled with this admiration for having our internal thought-bearings shifted so momentously. However, we do not complain; instead, we assume credibility. Cusk continues to follow this logical structure of presenting a micro-experience for analysis, before passing her critiques to more open interpretation. “...the responsibility of driving, its visual and mental burden, is passed to those outside it” (6). Cusk reminds us that the passers-by, the other people in their own vehicles, must be wary of each other. One must follow the imperative of the road, possessing that sensitive attunement to the unintended trajectories of other drivers, and swerve to avoid. We are dependent on the virtue of others. The depth of another person— how liminal a concept! —- often eclipses us, yet our lives may be impacted most seriously by a stranger’s decisions. Cusk balances finely on the curb between her recounts, dissections, and realizations.

Foremost, however, it is our actions that may lead to our peril, whether they are written out for us or not. Cusk explores the similarities between fiction and reality in her discussions of other notable authors and their works. With the depth of her analysis, her literary allusions may be treated as a type of anecdote. In ‘On Françoise Sagan’, Cusk tells the tragic tale of Sagan’s death: “Bonjour Tristesse concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving invariably forms part of the legend of her life, received severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed” (209). Wryly, Cusk adds in the following sentence, “The disappointment among the obituary writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny is palpable” (210). We are left stunned by the terrible, gravitational pull of this statement, delivered with a sliver of casual gallows humor from Cusk as she portrays Sagan as both creator and subject of this self-fulfilling prophecy.

What Cusk trades in are metaphors: here, she contrasts Sagan against her created heroine, Céline, to signify Sagan’s entanglement in her own plot. “It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can sometimes become fate…Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters… [writers], with their mortal grasp on the faculty of imagination, have crushed our illusions about human destiny” (209). According to Cusk, the writer merges with the reader’s schematic interpretation of the novel, yet the narrative is broken with a sudden interjection from reality: a news article, a hurried obituary. We infer that attempting to take on some transient role as the deity of their fictional world is perhaps the writer’s ultimate goal. As Judith Thurman, staff writer at The New Yorker, remarks, “an old core principle of the writer’s vocation [is] to presume authority” (Thurman). The craft allows one to leave their flawed human legacy behind for an ephemeral moment, to be worshipped as something other, a product of imagination blotting out imperfections. As a prolific writer herself, Cusk is sympathetic to the misfortunes the profession entails, paying tribute to the circumstances of Sagan’s tragic death. Now that Sagan’s temporary evasion of mortality has long concluded, it is ‘safe’ to identify her as human and indicate that respects are due. Cusk leaves it a mystery whether it is truly the author who follows their simultaneous “fetter” and “fate” (209), or vice versa, perhaps for the sake of poetic justice.

The obscurity of the female identity is another topic Cusk moves to dispel with her fresh take on women’s writing and feminism, her attempt to shift the type of narrative that has been spun to death. Her essay ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ defines women’s writing as “not simply a literature made by women but one that arises out of, and is shaped by, a set of specifically female conditions. A book is not an example of ‘women’s writing’ simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man” (164). The fact that Cusk defines ‘women’s writing’ by what it cannot be speaks volumes about the plight of the 21st-century woman: shackled by the constraints set upon her, she must only push harder to set herself apart. With her heavy reference to Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf’s ideas on the ‘woman writer’, Cusk demonstrates her stability as a creator by basing her analyses on the theories of her forbears. She proves the need for the ‘woman writer’ to “cling onto what representation there is” (170) in the male-dominated literary sphere, to avoid losing her writing identity in favor of avoiding confrontation.
If the ‘woman writer’ chooses to conform, she “loses her integrity – and her chance of greatness – in the attempt to join male literary culture” (166). Cusk follows, citing Woolf, that “the woman writer might have to break everything – the sentence, the sequence, the novel form itself – to create her own literature” (qtd. in ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ 172). As seen throughout, the scrap-cut technique that Cusk employs, jumping back and forth between anecdotes and scenes from her life, might emulate the tumbling em-dashes and transient metaphors so prevalent in Woolf’s own writing. They both attempt to break “the sentence, the sequence” of their words. Furthermore, underlying Coventry as a whole is the dissonance between Cusk’s matter-of-fact tone and the close nature of her anecdotes and revelations. We know intimacies of Cusk’s life that may usually be divulged to a devoted confidante; the grievances of her childhood and present, but otherwise have little understanding of her identity, whose facets seem as various as the topics she writes on. Historically, the trope of women writing records of supposedly private thought has thrived on marketing the writer’s mental sequestration. Through exposing ‘“the feelings of women in a drawing-room’” (qtd. in Cusk 167), we tend to feel deliciously singled out as a reader for being privy to the honeyed secrets of another.

While Coventry does not follow exactly the structure of the epistolary or diary-writing woman, the reclamation of this narrative tool, portrayed as ‘weak’ in the literary circle, again points to the purpose of empowering the ‘woman writer’. Clearly, Cusk subjects herself to what she preaches: she “gut-renovates” (Thurman) the novel, fighting towards “a new template for the female voice” (‘On Natalia Ginzburg’, 242) that she may help create.

Coventry’s unlikely but strangely tangible metaphors are a powerful force in its rally against the typical, adding further depth to her analyses and lodging themselves persistently in the reader’s memory. “…One might wake from family life as from a bacchanal into the cold light of day” (‘Coventry’ 32). It is not an analogy traditionally suited to the idea of suburban, calming family existence, prompting us to think deeply about the congruence between the two. Whether or not we do recall hangovers worthy of rowdy Roman parties, one can imagine the shameful morning after: a morning of headaches, snappiness, and people who seem alien from their screaming counterparts mere hours before. Perhaps therein lies the resemblance— a stagnant path of regrets in Cusk’s somewhat tragic depiction of a torn family. The ambiguity of “bacchanal” is perhaps a fun nod to the enigmatic analogies one might find rife in works of ‘classic’ authors. The subjectivity of interpretation leaves these tales an entertaining, personalized fill-in-the-blank, dependent on personal experience.

The separate dimensions in which one can interpret Cusk’s metaphors can be felt similarly in ‘Making Home’, where Cusk remarks, “Entering a house, I often feel that I am entering a woman’s body, and that everything I do there will be felt more intimately by her than by anyone else” (76). We may interpret this “entering a woman’s body” to mean penetration or intercourse, a jarring metaphor that clashes with the childhood comfort of home. Alternatively, the allusion to the female form may refer to home as a realm of domesticity, historically associated with the diligent housewife. Moving through the house, Cusk feels more attached to the living space. Considering her role as a mother of two daughters, home represents a narrative Cusk is capable of constructing for herself, a visual representation of her character. “At home, everywhere I looked I now seemed to see a hidden part of myself that was publicly exposed: the numberless private decisions I had made…were exhibited for all to see.” (70). Cusk’s home is an extension of herself; her intimacies are divulged—her personification of the house as both a sentient, breathing organism and a personality indicator also reflects on the far-reaching, flexible roles of those who maintain it. Rather like the visual trick of Rubin’s Vase, it is a struggle to keep both the maternal house-being and the more visceral image in mind, creating a fascinating, hooking conflict. Coventry is all the more memorable for its provocative duality and the discomfort it brings us to linger upon.

“All my life I have been terrified of Coventry, of its vastness and bleakness and loneliness, and of what it represents, which is ejection from the story” (‘Coventry’ 37). It is clear that Cusk’s fraught, rocky relationship with her parents and her past experiences with ostracism have influenced her perspective as a writer. Yet Cusk concludes ‘Coventry’ by claiming how she will gladly sink into its grasp after years of attempted evasion, turning it into a comfort of her own. “I don’t want to leave Coventry. I’ve decided to stay.” Whether she truly believes this statement is irrelevant, save for the narrative's continuation. Keeping in Coventry may seem like foolhardiness or ego to others’ eyes, though Cusk exemplifies what she says about women’s writing: she wishes to take control of her own path. She explains this desire for personal authority best in her New Yorker interview: ‘“Being in control of my own destruction…has always seemed like a solution for it.”’ (Thurman)

Coventry is a poignant, pensive work that transcends its era; Cusk’s push to take charge and subvert expectations while aiming to incite similar free thought in us. Imagination and analysis, fiction and reality clash in her combination of the personal and the literary, with dichotomous metaphors masterfully interwoven throughout. With that, I urge you, the reader, to parse this collection carefully and ruminate upon its subtleties. As with one’s first-ever shot of whiskey, one may come to enjoy its bitter notes, the searing sensation it evokes, or spit it out in disgust. “The sheer energy and wilful, self-constructing logic of narrative, which at first made one cringe and protest every time the truth was dented, came over time to seem preferable to elusive, chaotic reality” (‘Coventry’ 30). Reeling from the concluding words of one of Cusk’s essays, one comes to prefer the story she crafts to the world we must face outside. The second thing the reader desires, after the first of capturing crucial understanding, is an escape. It is far easier to succumb to a narrative already spun than to create our own. Yet our “ejection from the story” need not be so painful; won’t we learn in time to embrace it properly? For now, bleary-eyed and head pounding, we must step out from Coventry into the cold, harsh daylight of reality, and learn to be conductors of our own lives again.

Works Cited:
Cusk, Rachel. ‘On Natalia Ginzburg.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, p. 242.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Coventry.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 30-2.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Driving as Metaphor.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 4-9.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘On Françoise Sagan.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 209-10.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 164-72.
Cusk, Rachel. ‘Making Home.’ Coventry. Kindle Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, pp. 70-6.
Thurman, Judith. “Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 31 July 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/rachel-cusk-gut-renovates-the-novel. Accessed 28 Jan, 2022.