The Bradshaw Variations Book

Moving backward through Cusk's oeuvre I come to this novel featuring flawed suburbanites'couples whom Cusk, in the end, treats gingerly. There is no need to be cruel since we all suffer from some sort of imaginative lapse, whether or not be can recognize our own among those described here. One character is a woman often silent and dressed in black, standing watching, judging, and sometimes relating the action to readers. But she can wear blinkers in her own household, not recognizing how untethered and unsure her husband has become in his role, until he abandons part of it.

This is another of Cusk's book that begins with a challenge, in this case, the question What is art? Readers will look forward to how this book relates to that question, repeated time and again throughout the narrative, just about the time the reader feels far removed from that promising interrogative start. And the final scene is another of Cusk's remarkable, unforgettable bloodbaths which recall theatrical roots that seem to underpin much of Cusk's work.

Three couples, the husbands all brothers, hold special delights for those tracing the effects a father might have on children and grandchildren, though the father, now an old man, is mostly just a memory. "[Leo] has never heard his father raise his voice. There has been no need to raise it: it is in the leveling persistence that the violence is accomplished…it goes over everything and mechanically levels it, like a tank. It is benign, ruthless, unvarying…His voice has talked in Leo's head about the world and its ways since he can remember." The father barely shows in person until that fateful last scene. We realize then that any failures or successes of the now-grown sons probably have little to do with the father after all this time. The range of the boys' personalities prompt sniggers of recognition among those who have grown up with siblings, so used are we to the way the confident, the envious, and the spoilt interact.

We also get three different views of marriage, four, if you count the parents, still married after all these years. Howard and Claudia seem so unlikely until near the end when we see what holds them together. Leo and Susie limp along together, Leo relying on Susie to interface the world for him, despite her frequent tipping over into barely managing. Tonie has her own job, dresses in black, and generally stands aloof while her husband Thomas struggles with his own identity and sense of self-worth. Each brother is a little jealous of the others, except perhaps Howard, the entrepreneur. He sees the world for what it is and works with it.

This is a wonderful novel filled to overflowing with characterizations of people, of events, of passions, of depressions. We are not necessarily led anywhere'that is, it is essentially plotless, like a life is plotless. But it makes us recognize actions which will lead to an unhappy outcome, barring any intervention. It can be a mirror or a map, depending on where the reader finds him/herself. It is beautifully deft and concise, the prose that brings us the struggles, joys, failures, and ambitions of the Bradshaws. And it features a dog and a piano and an adagio that tick-tocks like a clock. Time is relevant.