Lost Little Lamb: Rachel Cusk's Saving Agnes
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, she's a twenty-something junior editor for the trade magazine Diplomat's Week. She's also Roman Catholic, and phonetically her name recalls the Latin phrase Agnus Dei (Lamb of God). From what very, very little I remember from my childhood church-going Sundays, an oft repeated refrain from scripture reads, "Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Grant us peace." Agnes has undertaken quite a project for herself, personal and worldly salvation. And peace of mind. Agnes is not all that different from Helen Fielding's Bridget, of Bridget Jones's Diary fame. She's an editor in London, relies on a close circle of friends, and looks vainly for love and, well, for just
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