Refusing to Please or Placate
How Rachel Cusk remains her cold self throughout 'Coventry'
News & Reviews Magazine
This article is part of ‘CuskRama’, our May special edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable.
The piece you’re reading now is by Neha Kale. Neha is a widely-published writer working in many forms including criticism, journalism, essay and other nonfiction. For more than a decade, her writing on art, contemporary culture and society has appeared frequently in international and Australian publications including The Sydney Morning Herald, ArtReview, Vogue, Elephant, VICE, The Guardian, Griffith Review, Art Guide Australia, SBS, Kill Your Darlings, Gourmet Traveller, Running Dog, i-D, Wonderground, BBC and more. Neha currently writes a fortnightly column called ‘The Influence’, interviewing cultural figures about the art that has informed their lives for The Saturday Paper. She was the editor of VAULT magazine from 2015 to 2018 and is now working on her first book.
Neha wrote this brilliant essay about the so-called ‘Sad Girl Novel’ for News & Reviews last year too:
Bri Lee: Over our many years of friendship, you and I have talked about Rachel Cusk’s work a lot.
Neha Kale: A lot.
BL: Why have you chosen to talk about Coventry specifically?
NK: Coventry is marketed as this book about motherhood and choice. But if you read the essays, it’s about the rupture of narrative and about the ways in which narratives dissolve, and about mismatches in subjectivity. How we’re told we should understand the world versus how the world actually is, and what it means to fall out of structures that are supposed to hold you as a woman. That, to me, is really interesting. And re-reading it, Coventry actually speaks to a lot of her fiction in massive ways, right? It's about so many of the structures and what does it mean for these things to fall apart? And what does it mean for you to no longer be a participant in the story? The Outline Trilogy is all about the death of plot and the death of character. And this whole collection of commentary does the same thing. So, for instance, the title essay is about being ‘sent to Coventry’, which is an English expression about fighting with someone and being given the silent treatment, and the kind of violence that is part of that. And it’s about how you transgress certain boundaries, and the tension of that piece is, at the end of the essay, she decided that she’s comfortable staying in Coventry. She’s kind of like, ‘I’m gonna stay outside the circle of love, my parents love.’ In all of her books, what I deeply appreciate about Rachel Cusk as a writer is that she’s not trying to please the reader. She’s so brittle. She’s cold. She is not trying to please a reader with her writing. In fact, sometimes her writing is, like, actively hostile.
BL: Even at a sentence level. I remember some of Aftermath [the book, as well as ‘Aftermath’ the essay] is hostile.
[Laughter]
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