Lost Little Lamb: Rachel Cusk's Saving Agnes
Agnes is stuck in limbo. Like Bridget, she's needy in relationships, and like Bridget, she possesses a penchant for falling for the wrong guy.
There are some wonderful evocatively written passages throughout the novel. Consider, for instance, the following advice Rachel's mom bestows upon her: "And what I've been trying to say to you is that you have to go on, because as much as life knocks you down, really life is the only thing that can pick you up again." There are also some not so wonderfully convoluted passages that require you to back up and, with Agnes-like confusion ask, "what?" For example: "The pattern of their confluence emerged and her days arranged themselves around it like petals on a stalk." (i.e. Her relationship with her new boyfriend begins to follow a set pattern. Oh.) And, sometimes the repartee among Agnes and her friends or between Agnes and her brother is a bit too witty. It's all funny and apt and suited to each character's personality, but it's a bit too much, as if the characters are always on; hence, the witticisms often prevent the characters, or the relationships among them, from developing more fully. Too much sarcasm paints over the sometimes nuanced portraits of friendships. When Cusk flakes away at the one-liners and exposes the subtleties, she's dead on target. At one point, Agnes and her friend Nina are tentatively reconciling after an intense spat, and they find themselves making coffee in the kitchen: "The strain of politeness lent things a certain awkwardness...In the course of their duties they almost collided with one another, and found themselves engaging in a quickstep of embarrassed avoidances like strangers on a pavement." We've all traveled across that uncomfortable landscape before.
Thankfully, Cusk's probing and delicate prose shines in the end to reveal Agnes's gentle (lamb-like?) yet satisfying epiphany. Recalling the Titanic of the opening pages, Agnes remembers dreams where she's perched in her favorite tree as if "at the prow of a ship." Except this time, she appears to be sailing rather than sinking.
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Other novels by Rachel Cusk:
Life's Work (Forthcoming, September 2001)
Also by Rachel Cusk, a non-fiction on-line review of Martin Amis's Heavy Water and Other Stories., Spring. Blooming daisies and frolicking lambs. Daisies may be absent from Rachel Cusk's Saving Agnes, but the protagonist, the Agnes of the title, is a lamb. Well, not literally. Literally,
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