The Lucky Ones: A Novel - Hardcover

Cusk, Rachel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 000716131X ISBN 13: 9780007161317

Publisher: Harper, 2004

Synopsis

The Lucky Ones is a novel about creating and sustaining life during times of great transformation. The five people whose lives converge here are also haunted by family -- the longing for love, the struggle to connect. 

A young pregnant mother wrestles with utterly changed circumstances; a new father searches for a sign of the man he used to be; a daughter yearns for a lost childhood; and a mother reaches out in bewilderment to a child she can't fully understand. Accidental connections and overlapping relationships build a complex family portrait: all are linked by the elemental impact of children on adult lives.

This profound evocation of family and its magnetic bonds reveals the mysterious forces that separate us from those we love and bind us to what we no longer understand.

The Lucky Ones will stop you cold with its startling precision and power. Demonstrating a rare gift for illuminating "the bustling concourses of life" without sacrificing emotional depth or complexity, this rare and stunning novel confirms Rachel Cusk's place among our most incisive writers.

About this title

About the Author

RACHEL CUSK is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Second Place and the Outline trilogy. She has written three memoirs—A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath—as well as the novels Saving Agnes, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Temporary; The Lucky Ones; In the Fold; Arlington Park; and The Bradshaw Variations. Twice a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists for 2003, Rachel Cusk is Canadian and lives in Paris.

From the Back Cover

The Lucky Ones is a novel about creating and sustaining life during times of great transformation. The five people whose lives converge here are also haunted by family -- the longing for love, the struggle to connect. 

A young pregnant mother wrestles with utterly changed circumstances; a new father searches for a sign of the man he used to be; a daughter yearns for a lost childhood; and a mother reaches out in bewilderment to a child she can't fully understand. Accidental connections and overlapping relationships build a complex family portrait: all are linked by the elemental impact of children on adult lives.

This profound evocation of family and its magnetic bonds reveals the mysterious forces that separate us from those we love and bind us to what we no longer understand.

The Lucky Ones will stop you cold with its startling precision and power. Demonstrating a rare gift for illuminating "the bustling concourses of life" without sacrificing emotional depth or complexity, this rare and stunning novel confirms Rachel Cusk's place among our most incisive writers.

Reviews

Billed as a novel of "overlapping relationships," Whitbread-winner Cusk's evocative latest, with its tenuously connected sections, feels more like a short story collection linked by theme and a few shared characters. Cusk (The Country Life; Saving Agnes) unites her tales via her characters' lonely, isolated conditions and the knotty relationships between parents and children—from Kristy, an imprisoned mother-to-be who gives birth in the back of a squad car in "Confinement," to Mrs. Daley, an unhappy, controlling woman whose need to establish herself as a victim trumps her ability to find or give happiness in "Mrs Daley's Daughter." Cusk's vision of contemporary relationships is a lonely, wintry one, in which people's inner landscapes dominate. This makes for gorgeous, languorous writing in places, but it also restricts the view: the landscapes are so rich with pathos that there isn't always enough room for the range of human emotion so essential to prose that relies on thought instead of action. In "The Sacrifices," a married woman who never had the baby she desired visits her childhood home, now occupied by strangers, and fantasizes about returning to her old room: "I would sit on my bed as the afternoon turned outside the window to night. I would wait for them to call me down." This passivity runs throughout the book, as characters tend toward rumination rather than deed. But as readers come to the end, the lives of Cusk's characters begin to tie together hauntingly. This is not life in all its messy complexity, but a mannered, poignant portrait of the treacheries of domestic life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The women in these five linked vignettes are all connected to a journalist named Serena Porter, either personally or as readers of the weekly column she writes about her family life. While they struggle to understand their painful and awkward responses to lovers and children, she spins the raw material of motherhood and marriage into witty and topical dispatches. Of course, much of what Serena writes is factitious, both in its details (she freely appropriates an acquaintance's experience as her own) and in the breezy complacency that it projects; Cusk seems to suggest that our true thoughts about love and family defy articulation. Such is her gift for capturing women's psychology and their sense of their place in the world that the novel achieves what Serena's column cannot: a fresh and compassionate portrait of a generation's feelings about motherhood.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

In her insightful fourth novel, Whitbread Award winner Cusk, author of Saving Agnes (1993), incisively cuts to the core of parenthood and its effect on marriage and female self-esteem. Cusk introduces a cast of characters diverse in age and gender, apparently autonomous but actually tenuously tied by threads of coincidence. These include a wrongly imprisoned young woman who has to surrender her newborn, a group of newlyweds on holiday who are either escaping their children or professing not to want any, a middle-aged and childless divorcee struggling to understand her inability to love, an acerbic mother who relishes her grown daughter's insecurities, and a doting mother who wonders if she will become redundant after her children are grown. All are perceptively drawn by Cusk, their motives and relationships dissected with a surgeon's skill. Connections between even the most disparate characters are gradually revealed as the author brings the novel full circle. Lacking the hilarity of her earlier works, this poignant, evocative novel is meant to be savored. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 000716131X
• ISBN 13: 9780007161317
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240