The Sculptural Rightness of Her Limbs: Rachel Cusk's The Bradshaw Variations Show Notes
Show Notes for Rachel Cusk's The Bradshaw Variations
This post contains the show notes for the most recent edition of our Cordelivres Criticism Club podcast, on Rachel Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations. Check out the episode if you haven’t yet—it’s free!
And there are a couple of photos of my edition down below.
Let’s get into it!
Rachel Cusk and the 21st Century Novel
We started off the show with a bit of a general discussion on Cusk and her career; anyone who got a chance to listen to the first episode we did about her work, on The Last Supper, knows that I think her writing is the most significant of the last twenty or thirty years. We talk a little about why I think that, and the scope of her oeuvre. We’ll have more episodes on her work in the future, both in the main feed and for the Bloomsbury Club.
On the show today, though, we’re talking (eventually!) about The Bradshaw Variations, her seventh novel, from 2009. This book—our second instance of third-person present tense on the show—follows the extended Bradshaw family over the course of a single year. The “conceit” here is that the husband, Thomas, has decided to quit his academic job and spend the year learning the piano and looking after Alexa, his daughter, while his wife, Tonie, goes back to work after having been at home the last several years. So, there we go re: plot. We also take a look at the marketing pitch on the back cover, just for fun—it really has nothing to do with the novel itself!
The novel is interested in art, in a word, as we get from the opening sentence: What is art? The really interesting thing about the book’s composition is how Cusk uses her own approach to free-indirect style (broadly speaking) to answer that very question in its own design. Cusk's use of perspective remains consistent, offering a broad view of the characters that’s also quite intimate at times; we’re able to move quickly while still being very invested in these people and their lives. That’s driven by her use of F-ID, which is actually quite unusual and intriguing in The Bradshaw Variations.
Free-Indirect Style as an Observational Quality
As we say in the show, what Cusk does really well here is the way in which her narrating entity observes things based on whose perspective we’re in. We talk about how, in some writers—Woolf would be an example—free-indirect can be quite messy, mechanically; the syntax has a lot of those pyrotechnics that we see on the page, plunging immediately into a character’s mind-style with extreme fidelity.
Cusk does that too, especially in her more recent work, but she’s also innovated this type of “observational” F-ID that we can see really well in The Bradshaw Variations. We talk in the show about how, essentially, the narration looks where the perspective character looks, rather than “bending” the language and style around their mind. So where Woolf, in MRSD, refracts her mechanics around Clarissa in a line like “For Lucy had her work cut out for her,” Cusk here does say, this:
What is art? Thomas Bradshaw asks himself this question frequently. He does not yet know the answer. He used to believe art was a kind of pretending, but he doesn't think that anymore. He uses the word authenticity to describe what he thinks now. Some things are artificial, and some are authentic. It is easy to tell when something is artificial. The other is harder.
In the mornings, he listens to music, to Bach or Schubert. He stands in the kitchen in his dressing gown. He waits for his wife and daughter to come downstairs. He is forty-one, the age when a life comes out of its own past like something out of a mould; and either it is solid, all of a piece, or it fails to hold its shape and disintegrates. The disintegration is not difficult to imagine. It is the solidity, the concrete form, that is mystifying. Disintegration does not involve questions of authenticity, but of a solid form; the questions must be asked.
The warping, or manipulation, of the prose here is less syntactically—less about the words, the grammar, or even the sentences—so much as it is the concept, the that-which-is-being-observed, the parts and facts of the (fictive) world that are called to account in the narrative, and, thereby, the narration. For Thomas, these questions of authenticity and artificiality—which in turn have to do with art—ultimately cash out in life; in the way in which it is lived and “made solid.” It’s the noticing, done by the narrating entity in his perspective chapters, which makes this focus manifest, rather than something “telling” those ideas to us.
For his wife, Tonie, who “On the train thinks about sex” before deciding (or nothing) that the “world is pure self, present tense, neither bad nor good,” there’s a greater ambiguity to life, which, in turn, is borne out by the narrative arc. (I avoid spoilers in the episode because I assume this is a book not everyone will have read, and people should really go and check this one out!)
This observational approach to F-ID, where the narration shows what characters observe rather than mimicking their thought patterns, also sees it maintain a (mostly) consistent syntax across different character perspectives while changing what is noticed; i.e., the POV stays, more or less, the same.
Conceptual Expression—“The Stone in the Pool”
One way Cusk can make this approach work—in The Bradshaw Variations and elsewhere in her career, both fiction and nonfiction—is her acuity in distilling abstract concepts and expressing them in these killer sentences that hit the reader full-on. In the show, we came up with a positively brilliant metaphor for this, discussing how Cusk eschews any scaffolding around these complex philosophical notions—not worrying about “introducing” them to the text or the reader—and simply dropping them into the novel like a stone in a pool.
We looked at a few selections to illustrate this, which she does all the time in the novel. A really strong example comes in a chapter about Claudia, the wife of Thomas’ brother Howard. I think it’s strong enough to carry without much setup:
Claudia has noticed the way a childless woman will defend the man. She will side against the mother, for her sympathies haven't yet been transformed. Claudia remembers, when Lottie 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.
A super strong moment; this was where her mother had lived all along. We spend some time with this on the episode, highlighting how Cusk, ultimately, is interested in (finding the boundaries of) using language to convey ideas and observations about the world. I think this is, in many ways, Cusk’s superpower (or one of them); the way in which she can wrangle these massive ideas—here, the domestic, filial relations between mother and daughter, roles in the home, and all the existential -feminist implications thereof—and force them down into a single image, one that retains the perspective character’s idiomatic slant to it while also being a really nice piece of writing that lends the passage a compelling poetic feel. Formidable!
The Bradshaw Variations is a great novel, fun, deep, and original; it has both narrative movement and philosophical depth, uncovering the meaning and role of art in domestic life. I really enjoyed this episode, and I hope you do as well; definitely give the book a read and let us know what you think! What is art?
Thanks so much for listening, and hope everyone enjoyed the talk.
À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.
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