The narrator is never named, and Jeffers is neither seen nor contextualised. Where the Outline trilogy centred the act of listening – the narrator often receding while the people she met recounted the details of their lives – Second Place re-establishes a more singular viewpoint, taking the form of either a letter or a slightly breathless address to someone called Jeffers. Second Place, it turns out, is a novel less about property, and more about the boundaries and misplaced emotional investment for which property is a proxy. This is, however, a Cusk novel, and in Cusk novels the surface, as experienced by reader and characters alike, invariably proves too fragile to be trusted. On the surface, then, this is a novel of glaring privilege, steeped in a mode of middle-class existence so rarified that the “lower things” must never be allowed to intrude. Now the narrator invites artists to use it as a kind of retreat, or, as she puts it, “a home for the things that weren’t already here – the higher things”. With the help of a group of men “who all help one another when there’s physical work to be done”, the cottage on the property was renovated. The narrator and her husband bought it “to prevent it from being misused”, or to put it another way, to prevent any disturbance to the boundaries of their idyll. The Second Place began as a “parcel of wasteland” adjoining the main property.
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