As mentioned in the accolades on the back cover, Cusk is an author whose style is in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and who, in small gestures of everyday life, short banal slices of her characters' lives and introspections into their inner selves, manages to tackle questions of being-in-the-world and the intricacies of interpersonal relationships. For example when Cusk describes the fleeting encounters between a man and his wife and the lack of conversation between the two:
»He wants her to know that he is aware of his own limitations, of his failure to make anything of their conversations in the morning. Sometimes this failure appears to him as something intrinsic to time itself, as an inner force, like decay. They pass and are forgotten, these interludes in the kitchen. And yet they are always the same«.
Or when Cusk describes common situations such as preparing for a car vacation and what feelings these simple things invoke in the individual: »Sometimes it is more than a clearing of the air, this business of going away. It is a death and rebirth for them all. The problem is that the holiday, when it comes, sometimes feels like it is happening to someone else.«
In the book, Cusk illustrates short episodes from the lives of the Bradshaw family, with the couple Thomas and Claudia as the guiding star of the narrative. A middle-class couple from the academic milieu who, due to the promotion of Tonie within their institute, are now in the position of family breadwinner, previously held by Thomas, who is now in the role of househusband. Based on these two, the themes of the book are now developed. For example, the role of art in the lives of individuals. The question with which the book begins - and as hackneyed as the question may sound, it is interspersed throughout the novel to explore what drives the individual characters - is: What is art? Does it have something to do with creativity and timelessness? Or is it simply the possession of a skill, as Thomas asks himself during a visit to the circus and watching acrobats? Is it something that is always linked to melancholy or can creating art also be lightness and part of everyday life, as Claudia Bradshaw asks herself when she looks at the studio she only rarely or never visits:
»[Claudia] set eyes on the tumbledown place at the bottom of the garden and saw in it the reflection of a part of herself. It seemed to stand poised between existence and annihilation, just as she in that moment felt herself to hover, a dissolving image, at the very brink of identity. In its abandonment it had become theoretical, like the mysterious region of herself that life could seem to find no use for, the series of urges to which she gave the name of creativity.«
What all the female characters in the Bradshaw family have in common is that they struggle with questions of responsibility, their own independence and the realization that life always means restriction and confinement:
»Claudia remembers, when [her daughter] was born, the prospect of self-sacrifice coming into view like a landscape seen from an approaching train; she remembers the steady unfolding of it, a place she had never seen before in her life, and herself inescapably bound for it; and then after a while the realisation, pieced together from numerous clues, that this was where her mother had lived all along.«
This confinement is also repeatedly evident in Cusk's descriptions of how her characters move around in their (usually rather small) rooms, houses and households:
»What happened was that all those years ago, she fell in love with the house: she fell in love with it, and then as she came to know more and more about it the love was divided and subdivided until each piece of knowledge was larger than its allotted share of affection. This is the lesson, the sermon: that facts outlive emotions, and that knowledge is therefore more powerful than love. There are infinite things to know, but the capacity for love is just that, a capacity, a space that can hold so much and no more.«
What makes these descriptions so exciting and moving is not only Cusk's very precise way of describing and emphasizing things, but also the fact that her characters do not succumb to helplessness and defeatism in the face of their existence and their everyday lives, but instead always find new insights and new guiding ideas for their lives.
»The world always offers a small opportunity for difference, among a large majority of things that are all the same; and equally unfailingly Tonie takes it, only remembering afterwards that being different is not the same as being right.«
Equally appealing, however, is Cusk's ruthlessness when she emphasizes the determination of her characters and the strength of their feelings, which in turn make the characters somehow unwavering and make certain attitudes and positions immovable:
»[I]t seems to her now that this is the true accomplishment, this informed solitude, this independence. Is it not sad, then, to be alone? Is it, after all, truer, more honourable? She imagines herself and Thomas, old. She images their lives so entangled that they could never be extricated. It would be horrible to die tangled up with another person, not to know precisely what it was that was dying.«
At the same time, however, Cusk also shows that there are uncertainties, doubts and questions to which it will never be possible to find an answer or to which there will be no external, but only a purely self-referential approach and to which the individuals will only answer for themselves, eventually. About Tonie's sister-in-law Claudia we learn:
»The feeling of letting go, of surrender: it warms her veins like a tranquiliser, spreading its numb bliss. She has blunted the sharp end of life this way. She fades out, her doubt and pain and anxiety left hollow like a casing, like a shell on a beach. She is used to it, to leaving hollowed-out things behind her. They lie scattered in her past, questions to which the answers were never found. What is the right way to live? What is the value of success? And the most important, the most unanswerable: if love is selfish, can it still be considered to be love?«
And, likewise, do the other characters struggle with the fact that they can't tell anyone else what things feel like inside them and that their inner feelings can never be fully revealed:
»Thomas doesn’t know that there is anything in her plight he ought to be moved by. And she can never explain it to him, for as a story it revolves around the disclosure of a desire for something that has no name and is itself nameless, that she could arrive at only by a path of negatives that would somewhere along the line have to pass through Thomas himself.«
The kind of ordinariness and familiarity of the characters' feelings and thoughts in the book makes it easy to get very close to them, as the feelings of the individual people are also written down here, which you may often be ashamed of or which you only deal with yourself for other reasons.
