The Lucky Ones [Paperback]

Rachel Cusk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 4, 2005

A young pregnant mother wrestles with an utterly changed life; a new father searches for a sign of the man he used to be; a daughter yearns for a lost childhood; and a mother reaches out in bewilderment to a child she can't fully understand. A rare novel that illuminates "the bustling concourses of life" without sacrificing emotional depth and complexity, The Lucky Ones confirms Rachel Cusk's place among our most incisive writers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Billed as a novel of "overlapping relationships," Whitbread-winner Cusk's evocative latest, with its tenuously connected sections, feels more like a short story collection linked by theme and a few shared characters. Cusk (The Country Life; Saving Agnes) unites her tales via her characters' lonely, isolated conditions and the knotty relationships between parents and children—from Kristy, an imprisoned mother-to-be who gives birth in the back of a squad car in "Confinement," to Mrs. Daley, an unhappy, controlling woman whose need to establish herself as a victim trumps her ability to find or give happiness in "Mrs Daley's Daughter." Cusk's vision of contemporary relationships is a lonely, wintry one, in which people's inner landscapes dominate. This makes for gorgeous, languorous writing in places, but it also restricts the view: the landscapes are so rich with pathos that there isn't always enough room for the range of human emotion so essential to prose that relies on thought instead of action. In "The Sacrifices," a married woman who never had the baby she desired visits her childhood home, now occupied by strangers, and fantasizes about returning to her old room: "I would sit on my bed as the afternoon turned outside the window to night. I would wait for them to call me down." This passivity runs throughout the book, as characters tend toward rumination rather than deed. But as readers come to the end, the lives of Cusk's characters begin to tie together hauntingly. This is not life in all its messy complexity, but a mannered, poignant portrait of the treacheries of domestic life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

The women in these five linked vignettes are all connected to a journalist named Serena Porter, either personally or as readers of the weekly column she writes about her family life. While they struggle to understand their painful and awkward responses to lovers and children, she spins the raw material of motherhood and marriage into witty and topical dispatches. Of course, much of what Serena writes is factitious, both in its details (she freely appropriates an acquaintance's experience as her own) and in the breezy complacency that it projects; Cusk seems to suggest that our true thoughts about love and family defy articulation. Such is her gift for capturing women's psychology and their sense of their place in the world that the novel achieves what Serena's column cannot: a fresh and compassionate portrait of a generation's feelings about motherhood.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (October 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007161328
• ISBN-13: 978-0007161324
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,808,774 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, March 26, 2004

By 

Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lucky Ones: A Novel (Hardcover)

Rachel Cusk's The Lucky Ones is an excellent collection of interconnected stories. It's not a novel in the traditional sense of the word, really a group of well-written stories with characters in each story popping up in the others. All of the stories focus on the relationship between parents and children, exploring the nature of the desire for becoming a parent--is it something innate, something we all have? Are some better parents than others, or are they all bad in their own way? The writing here is wonderful--very enjoyable. A well-done collection that hangs together much more cohesively than most other interconnected story collections I have read.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A novel to be re-read as it comes full circle, March 22, 2004

By 

Nancy E. Patton "Goodlookbooks" (Mornington Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lucky Ones: A Novel (Hardcover)

I have read every one of Rachel Cusk's novels and they just get better. While I am carried along by her stories, I am also marveling at her command of language, how just one sentence can reveal a whole life. She understands how men feel, as sensitively and acutely as she reveals a woman's heart. I read probably two or three books a week (usually in the wee small hours) and this would have to be the pick of the last six months' reading -- and that's saying something! This is a novel lover's novel - fiction that feels utterly real.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Missing something., April 23, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Lucky Ones: A Novel (Hardcover)

Cusk's The Country Life is one of my favorite novels of the last ten years. The characters are hysterical and tragic at the same time; her use of metaphor constantly amazed me with its subtle power; although not much actually happens in the plot, the chaotic internal life of the main character creates a vivacious momentum that carries you quickly through the novel.

I was thrilled when I saw that Cusk had a new book (I have not read her recent book about motherhood). But the energy of The Country Life was not here. Her characterizations in The Lucky Ones are insightful--her knack for exploring unusual relationships gives many of the stories their driving force--however, I just couldn't care about them. I blame the short story format. The characters are connected--loosely--but not enough to sustain the cessation of story after story. As soon as we start to wonder about the incarcerated woman, her story is over. What happens to Jane? To Lucy? To Martin & Dominique? The last two stories do an admirable job of bringing together the themes set forth on the book jacket, "haunted by family, longing for love, the struggle to connect," but I was left feel like I could shelve the book and never think about it again.

I highly recommend The Country Life if this is your first venture at Cusk. As for The Lucky Ones, it is not the best example of her abilities.