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"  Shortly after I&amp;#039;d given birth to my first child, a friend slipped me surreptitiously, almost brown-wrapper style, a book that I think might have saved my life. It was A Life&amp;#039;s Work: On Becoming a Mother, a 2001 memoir in which British writer Rachel Cusk examines with a vicious lack of sentimentality the pain of having her former life and self ripped away with the arrival of her newborn. The plot is circumscribed, as a new mother&amp;#039;s is, and divinely, baroquely expansive with detail. Cusk spends pages describing a torturous morning trying to get her daughter to stop crying and nap. &amp;quot;In the silent kitchen we sit, the baby watching me with bead bright, unfathomable eyes as she feeds, I watching her as one would watch some exotic, uncaged animal, wondering what she is going to do next.&amp;quot;  A Life&amp;#039;s Work offered me my first true escape from the claustrophobic prison in which I&amp;#039;d found myself since the birth of my son, not because it was a trip away from reality, but toward it. With a tearful sense of exhilaration and release, I suddenly could admit to my own ugly truths and emerge from what seemed like an almost fascistic requirement to dissemble. For I&amp;#039;d quickly realized, first in mothers&amp;#039; groups I joined in Manhattan and Brooklyn and even with my more simpatico newmother friends, that imagining one&amp;#039;s infant as foreign to oneself as an uncaged animal was unmentionable. (More typical was the tale of one woman in the Brooklyn group who related how she took her very first few hours alone post-birth to drive to an outlet mall and buy her baby a hideous pantsuit appliqu\u00E9d with ice skaters and glitter.) I found myself wading through relentless conversations about feeding schedules, in part invested in the topic, but in part frantically searching for a clearing in which to cry, &amp;quot;No, no...but how do you really feel? Isn&amp;#039;t it awful?&amp;quot; If I managed to mutter a few words to that effect, I might collect a round of commiserating nods, but what wasn&amp;#039;t countenanced was the notion that an in-depth discussion of the experience of having your life shattered beyond recognition might be more productive than pondering which Lamaze-endorsed toy baby liked best.  Given that history, it&amp;#039;s not surprising, I suppose, that my balm is other women&amp;#039;s bomb. Still read and discussed avidly by new mothers, A Life&amp;#039;s Work has become a cultishly worshipped or despised book, what the mother of one of my son&amp;#039;s classmates calls &amp;quot;the great delineator on the playground. Those who get her have an immediate bonding point. Those who don&amp;#039;t will never be my friend.&amp;quot; The haters accuse Cusk of despising children, despising mothers, of being an unforgivable whiner, an ingrate. Cusk&amp;#039;s crime seems to be my own: wanting not only to admit the sorrow that is part of the narcissistic blow of becoming a parent but wanting to dwell on all its fecund particulars. &amp;quot;The crying has stopped,&amp;quot; Cusk writes of her daughter&amp;#039;s colic. &amp;quot;She has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because, although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. With every cry she has tutored me, in what is plain and hard: that my affection, my silly entertainments, my doting hours, this particular self I tried to bring to my care of her, have been as superfluous as my fury and despair. All that is required is for me to be there; an `all&amp;#039; that is of course everything, because being there involves not being anywhere else.... Being myself is no compensation for not being there.&amp;quot;  Now comes Cusk&amp;#039;s latest work, a novel called The Bradshaw Variations. The book, due out this month, does not disappoint. Like a genius gem cutter, Cusk continues to brazenly flout the pure realism that dominates current literary fiction in favor of a Woolfean approach that uses style and sensory impressionism to chisel out inner turmoil. The Bradshaw Variations is a timely, necessary story about a year in the life of a husband (Thomas) and wife (Tonie) who upend their former division of labor: She takes a job heading the English department at the university where she used to teach part-time, while he agrees to leave the corporate sphere to devote himself to caring for the couple&amp;#039;s eightyear- old daughter and take up his piano playing more seriously.  The subject matter is not astonishing, except perhaps in its surface banality, but the tone\u2014and maybe what you&amp;#039;d call the level of artistry\u2014is. For both men and women, whether to work or not\u2014and whether and how we will have successful marriages and happy children, based on our levels of working or not\u2014is probably one of the central preoccupations of contemporary life (in those parts of the world where getting enough food isn&amp;#039;t the central concern).  Yet mostly what we&amp;#039;ve gotten in literary response to this collective conflict are comic, rueful takes along the lines of the fun but slight novel I Don&amp;#039;t Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson, or the well-executed but undemanding Slate column Freaky Fortnight, coauthored by a stay-at-home mom and a Slate editor who switch jobs for two weeks. And then there are the diatribes: We must work and have two children (Leslie Bennetts, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?); we must work but have only one child (Linda R. Hirshman, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World); we must work but pretend that we don&amp;#039;t in public (Caitlin Flanagan); we must not work, and get married when we are 19 (Danielle Crittenden, What Our Mothers Didn&amp;#039;t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman). Cusk&amp;#039;s approach does not proscribe, nor does it disregard by using farce as a deke out. What it does, other than entertain, is take seriously the immensity of the psychic arena devoted to these choices we make.  &amp;quot;With this book, I wanted to get out how amazingly difficult it is for a man to feel it&amp;#039;s right to be at home looking after children and for a woman to feel it&amp;#039;s right for her to be playing second fiddle, the one who is not primarily responsible for the children,&amp;quot; Cusk says when I interview her from her home in Bristol, UK, which she shares with her photographer husband, their two daughters, and Cusk&amp;#039;s stepdaughter. Our unruly emotions refuse to heel, Cusk goes on, &amp;quot;no matter how much we try to live the life of feminist possibility of [women] continuing to work while having children...I wanted to describe how people can&amp;#039;t try to do these things unless deeply in their hearts they refute the role of mother and father that is imprinted on their psyche from childhood.&amp;quot;  In short, The Bradshaw Variations does for midlife working parents what A Life&amp;#039;s Work did for new mothers. Which is another way of saying that I&amp;#039;m expecting the new book to be as polarizing as Life&amp;#039;s Work, and, actually, as polarizing as Cusk&amp;#039;s previous novel Arlington Park, about a day in the life of a group of women in a provincial British city\u2014a poetic, dazzlingly intelligent, at times scathing, at times deeply sympathetic examination of contemporary womanhood. Released in 2006, the book got its share of five-star, why-didn&amp;#039;t-this-win-the- Booker? praise, but its detractors were equally vehement. The main plaint in both lay and professional forums? Cusk&amp;#039;s protagonists were not nice. As one Amazon reviewer, who, near the end of her denunciation suggests that Cusk must be a chronic depressive based on the &amp;quot;lank&amp;quot; hair in her author photo, put it, &amp;quot;It is very difficult to continue reading a book when you cannot stand a single character. These women were repulsive to me: thoughtless, insensitive, unloving.&amp;quot; The literati&amp;#039;s attack mode, meanwhile, was to call the book &amp;quot;shrill&amp;quot; in a dismissive capsule review (The New Yorker) and, over at The New York Times Book Review, to assign it to another UK-based female author (itself a ghettoizing choice), who was unusually vicious by soft-pedaling Book Review standards. &amp;quot;There are some great moments,&amp;quot; Lucy Ellmann wrote, &amp;quot;but [Cusk] tends to over-egg the pudding with metaphor, simile, and melodramatic hyperbole when all she&amp;#039;s describing is a set of materially advantaged women getting through the day.&amp;quot; As a materially advantaged\u2014relatively speaking\u2014woman myself whose primary drama, when it comes down to it, is getting through the day, I wondered anew why my pudding was deemed over-egged if it was honored with metaphors, similes, and hyperbole. After all, aren&amp;#039;t these the primary figures of speech that writers concerned with writing as art use as their tools? The obvious assessment is that this is a sexist dismissal of the domestic as a worthy subject, but that strikes me as a decoy. Books by her contemporaries, such as Jonathan Franzen&amp;#039;s plot-laden The Corrections or Lorrie Moore&amp;#039;s critically praised A Gate at the Stairs, are about family. Then, too, why the edge of fury in Ellmann&amp;#039;s tone? Perhaps what bothered her was really something else\u2014something, dare I say, personal: Arlington Park, Ellmann wrote at another point in her review, is &amp;quot;the kind of book that makes you burn things on the stove and berate your husband.&amp;quot; Cusk, who is 43, tells me that she believes the generation of writers above hers, the Doris Lessings and Angela Carters, were willing to truly grapple with the conflicts in women&amp;#039;s lives, while her peers skirt them. Partly, she blames this on female writers&amp;#039; fear that they&amp;#039;ll be dismissed if they dwell too much on their own lives, but Cusk also muses about a larger cultural regression, a general &amp;quot;decision to turn your back on the possibilities of feminism,&amp;quot; and instead &amp;quot;to prize dependence on a man and the creation of children and the material reality of home, all of these capitalist, bourgeoise ways of being.&amp;quot; While Cusk professes what might sound like an outdated brand of feminism\u2014arguing that fulfilling work or a purpose beyond child care is a necessity for women, and that we&amp;#039;re refusing to admit we&amp;#039;re making a choice when we not only embrace patriarchal values but require a certain level of financial comfort\u2014her books say something that is newer and more radical. In not shrinking from what is despairing or unloving in her characters (who are, of course, us) and in limning so assiduously the shifting movements of their interior worlds\u2014with their embedded layers of genetics, nurture, immediate sensory onslaughts, and physical embodiment in a frail animal shell\u2014she tells us that none of our choices are easy, or without repercussions, and to pretend otherwise is to live falsely. What her writing pushes against is how we are expected, both women and men, to go along with a version of things that almost continuously denies how it really feels to live right now, whether we&amp;#039;re looking after children or out working, procreators or not, rich or poor. In The Bradshaw Variations, she describes Thomas remembering his corporate day: &amp;quot;It comes to him, the physical feeling of his London office, the big steel and Perspex building with its wires and blinking screens and shrilling telephones, the bitter smell of plastic and electric light, the hushed grey spaces, the sealed windows muffling the world\u2014everyone so chemical smelling and costumed, and the way people spoke, language itself made artificial, so that you found yourself looking at their teeth, their eyes, to remind yourself there was a human being in there. And most of all the feeling of being on board, of living in a never-resolving present, the feeling that all this artificiality could be sustained so long as it was never permitted to slip into the past. He remembers the way reality itself was made unreal.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a rebellious decision for Cusk to fix her eye, unwaveringly, on the truths of being flawed, troubled selves who make choices that feel like traps, and saying, by taking this inner experience to the level of art, that it&amp;#039;s perhaps more meaningful than anything else. Our inner lives are feminism&amp;#039;s last forbidden frontier. It might be the female artists who have to fight for the value in examining them, because women have more of a history of adventuring in the internal (think of Penelope at home at her loom while Odysseus travels the high seas), but it&amp;#039;s vital for men and women. In the early &amp;#039;90s, when the book Listening to Prozac first came out, I remember a friend saying, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll have to run away into the forest and create our own little society of the last angry people.&amp;quot; Now, almost 20 years later, what he predicted has arguably come to pass. Anger, ambivalence, simply a vision of ourselves as emotionally complex people\u2014operating as much out of vindictiveness, fear, and low-level depression as happiness\u2014are considered unproductive, possibly immoral. In the way that having genetically yellow teeth is now considered a hygiene problem that can and should be taken care of, so are our emotional lives, the stains erased and the inevitably continuing decay kept far from view. As the public whitens its teeth into a pained, blueish translucency, and embraces what Cusk calls the &amp;quot;just get on with it&amp;quot; culture (heaven forfend we should look too closely at just what, exactly, we are getting on with, and where it is going to get us), I&amp;#039;m escaping to the metaphorical forest with a pile of Cusk novels. I hope you&amp;#039;ll be brave enough to join me. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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