by Ann Levin, The Associated Press
Posted May 3, 2021 12:48 pm ADT
Last Updated May 3, 2021 at 12:55 pm ADT
This cover image released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux shows "Second Place," a novel by Rachel Cusk. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux via AP)
“Second Place,” by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
In 1922, the now-legendary arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan invited the British writer D.H. Lawrence to her home in Taos, New Mexico. A decade later, she published a memoir about the visit called “Lorenzo in Taos.”
Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, “Second Place,” was inspired by that memoir and written as a tribute to Luhan. One need not be familiar with the first to marvel at the second — a brilliant but flawed allegory filled with ravishing descriptions of nature set in an unidentified land after an unspecified global financial collapse that has rendered travel almost impossible.