‘Arlington Park’ is not an optimistic read, detailing as it does five women living lives of quiet desperation, though an edge of irony prevent it from becoming self-pitying or indulgent. The fact that the novel ends with a dinner party (hosted by Christine) is more than just a nod towards Virginia Woolf, and ‘Mrs Dalloway’ in particular. Also Woolfian is the use of an omniscient-viewpoint opening section describing a rainstorm, and a similar interlude.

The novel's structure of separate but linked episodes is one that Cusk has used before, in her 2003 novel-as-linked-stories ‘The Lucky Ones‘. From the very beginning of her career, there's always been something classical about Cusk's writing, a formal tone that offsets up-to-the-moment subject matter. In ‘The Country Life‘, still her best novel, this tone was used for comic effect. In ‘Arlington Park’ it doesn't always work, and in places Cusk is certainly guilty of overwriting. On the other hand her ear for dialogue and eye for character nuance is pin-sharp. She has a particular sensitivity to the ways that marriage and motherhood can entrap her characters. The women of ‘Arlington Park’ are certainly not always sympathetic - we aren't spared Christine's vulgarity and middle-Englander prejudices, for example - but they are always recognizable. We've likely met their real-life equivalents. And that's the uncomfortable residue that this novel leaves behind.

Gary Couzens was born in 1964 and lives and works in Aldershot. He has had twenty short stories accepted by F&SF, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Peeping Tom and other magazines, plus a large number of articles and reviews in The British Fantasy Society Newsletter, Zene and elsewhere. He has three novels in varying stages of completeness and has just started his fourth.