Arlington Park: Rachel Cusk

Five mothers who live in prosperous Arlington Park are the subject of this book.  We look at their lives during a single rainy day.  Their husbands are shadowy, their children pretty ghastly, and the women themselves seem, for different reasons, to be a pretty grim bunch.  They have lives that are pretty dreary, choked with unpleasant routine.  

And yet it’s a book to read with satisfaction and pleasure.  It can be funny, despite everything, and its real joy is the detailed yet telling descriptions of familiar things: a shopping centre, a bedroom, a kitchen the morning after, and in its evocation of mood. 

I wouldn’t want to pass much time with any of these women in real life, but between the pages of a book, they were definitely worth getting to know.