I know Rachel Cusk is revered by many, but I have to confess my only attempt with her fiction was a mixed blessing. I thought the writing was stunning, and the book had no momentum at all. I don’t normally mind the absence of plot, but Outline tested my limits. And yet, I wanted to try her again – and today I did, with Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012). I thought I might have more luck with her non-fiction.
The topic of Aftermath is, as the subtitle suggests, her marriage to the photographer Adrian Clarke, though he is unnamed in the book. It is a concession to privacy that is seldom paid much attention in the disconcertingly honest book – while some characters, including her daughter’s friends, are represented by an initial, it would be hard not to identify them if you knew them. Remorseless, relentless honesty is the order of the day.
Cusk uses the fire of their separation as the jumping-off point for a discussion of many different things – starting with a look at gender roles in marriage, and what feminism is or is not. Like many women, she found that the division of labour in the home was extremely unequal.
My notion of half was more like the earthworm’s: you cut it in two, but each half remains an earthworm, wriggling and fending for itself. I earned the money in our household, did my share of the cooking and cleaning, paid someone to look after the children while I worked, picking them up from school once they were older. And my husband helped. It was his phrase, and still is: he helped me. I was the compartmentalised modern woman, the woman having it all, and he helped me to be it, to have it. But I didn’t want help: I wanted equality. In fact, this idea of help began to annoy me. Why couldn’t we be the same? Why couldn’t he be compartmentalised, too? And why, exactly, was it helpful for a man to look after his own children, or cook the food that he himself would eat? Helpful is what a good child is to its mother. A helpful person is someone who performs duties outside their own sphere of responsibility, out of the kindness of their heart. Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude. And did I not have something of the same gratuitous tone where my wage-earning was concerned? Did I not think there was something awfully helpful about me, a woman, supporting my own family?
It is a battle cry heard over and over again by anybody dissecting the ways in which gender norms create inequality in marriage. Cusk describes it well, and perhaps it was more novel a cry in 2012, though it will not surprise anybody any more. Not that things have changed since 2012, I suspect. It’s just that the reader is more likely to nod their head and roll their eyes than think that Cusk has uncovered something shocking and new. The opening is quite abstract. And because it is retreading now-familiar ground, it didn’t have the impact it could have done if she were a bit sharper with specifics.
Thankfully, she does exactly that in the next section – what a wonderfully specific detail this is:
The day my husband moved his possessions out of our house I had toothache. It was raining, and all morning the door to the street stood open. The wet air gusted in and the dim hall lay like an opened tomb in the grey daylight. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, my hands over my mouth, like a mime artist pantomiming dismay.
She is on far surer ground when relating actual events than she is when trying to philosophise about them in the abstract. The strongest, most memorable parts of Aftermath, in my opinion, were these sharp moments – for example, a story about renting terrible accommodation while her children went horse-riding, or the awkward experience of a lodger moving into the spare room after her husband’s departure, or the extraction of the aforementioned tooth. Cusk is seldom generous in her descriptions of anyone, including herself, and she is vicious in her physical depictions of even the most casual background ‘character’. Make of that what you will.
Along the way, Cusk broadens out from her own experiences to seek parallels in a shared cultural history. There is a lot drawn from Greek mythology, though my knowledge of Clytemnestra et al is very shaky – I’m grateful for Cusk including the details we need to know to make the comparison (though if her understanding of them is as weak as her understanding of the Bible, then I have some doubts if I’m actually any the wiser).
Still, the best parts of the book – which I enjoyed reading a lot, despite some misgivings – were those parts where she put aside the abstract and went for the concrete. The irony of the book is that there is very little that is precise about her marriage or separation – and far more drawn from later events, or events with other people. As the book progresses, she turns her attention to ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’, three people with whom she forms some sort of connection. Y, for example, is some sort of counsellor.
It is strange to discuss my marriage in this room; its neutrality is almost chastising, makes the story both more lurid and more sombre, like the orderly courtrooms in which suited committees analyse war crimes, carefully dissect individual acts of thoughtless brutality and havoc over matching coffee cups. It is aftermath, the thing that happens once reality has occurred.
Throughout, Cusk’s writing is exceptionally good. It was only when I finished it that I realised – despite the tone and feel of total honesty – that I didn’t really know anything at all about her marriage or her separation. You never get a sense of what drew Cusk to Clarke, or any of his positive qualities (presuming he has them). You don’t even get a sense of his particular negative ones, besides an unenlightened approach to marital roles, which is admittedly a significant one. Perhaps the most revealing description of their marriage really comes in a curious short story that concludes the book, which has a moment of revelation that made me gasp.
It’s odd for a work of memoir to feel so blisteringly open, often in ways that it would be hard to advise, while also being something of a closed book. And despite not really being the book I expected, I’d still recommend it. I’m not sure it’s the book Cusk thinks it is, or that I imagined I’d be reading, but it’s a very good one nonetheless.