Perhaps I wasn’t in the best place for reading The Bradshaw Variations, but it feels like a rare miss from Rachel Cusk. Cusk’s second place and Kudos left me feeling enlightened, if depressed, and I thought the characters and scenes were so powerfully wrought. Turning to The Bradshaw Variations, I can appreciate its project of focusing on the minutiae of a banal life, but it felt like both too much and too little.
Cusk’s writing of the minutiae, I think I read somewhere, is offered as a challenge to the male writers who dwell in the banal. I’m thinking about my scathing review of John Updike’s Terrorist, wherein pages are spent on him fat shaming a woman trying to pick up the remote control from the floor. Cusk dwells in similar minutiae, though not nearly as abrasively and in a much more philosophical register. I can get behind the philosophy of elevating the everyday (it doesn’t all have to be grand narratives and epic quests!), but even so The Bradshaw Variations felt a little thin.
The central premise is that Tonie Swann takes on the English headship at her school and the increased demands of her job mean that Thomas, her husband, has to stay home and care for their young daughter. Cusk explores the ways that such a change can impact family dynamics. One of my favourite scenes in the text is when Tonie corrects Thomas when he talks about their daughter’s friend’s mother. When he has a more extended conversation with her, he notices all the details that Tonie got slightly wrong and has that little bit of relish at his vindication.
In fact, the characters in the book are all pretty petty. In another scene, there is an older couple who tend to a garden. The man is out working and the woman is out somewhere, long after she’d promised to return home. The man gets increasingly annoyed and then engages in self-denial as his revenge. When the woman returns and finds he never had his tea and biscuits, he tells her, “You said you’d be here. It seemed sensible to wait” (43). In fact, the narration tells us, “He is parched, and when he straightens up from stooping over the gravel he is slightly dizzy. She stands there with flushed cheeks, her mouth drooping at the corners. Sometimes he forgets that he and she are old, and then the sight of her reminds him” (43). When she insists on making the tea, he refuses: “I don’t want it now. I don’t like to have tea later than four. It spoils my supper” (43). They engage in a back-and-forth where she offers and her refuses and so on and so on. In the pettiness of the moment there’s a philosophical introspection:
He bends down again with his trowel. He can see her feet beside him on the gravel path, the ropes of blue veins, the calloused toes bunched in her sandals. He wonders what she will do. The air between them seems to tremble; the atmosphere is a dark bud straining to burst into flower. He wants its offering, of love or violence. He wants to be located in the maze of his own rigidity and offered something. That is the test, as it has always been. (43).
The image of a “dark bud straining to burst into flower” seems a perfect symbol for the moment. The ambiguity of “love or violence” being at the core of the bloom also encapsulates the tension of the moment and when she continues questioning him about why he didn’t have tea, “He does not reply. This is not what she ought to have said. It leaves him in the maze; it asks him to find his own way out” (43). I think it’s a great reflection of the way we hold certain expectations of others and how those expectations trap us to our own detriment. When the woman decides to have tea on her own,
He hears her crunch away. She is gone. He feels presence of a terrible void, advancing on him, coldly enveloping him. It is silence: Gus has turned his mower off. Later he hears her return through the dusk to where he still bends over the gravel, weeding. She places a cup of tea at his feet with two bourbon biscuits in the saucer, and then swiftly she is gone again. The biscuits are his favourite kind. He watches them out of the corner of his eye as he works; he meditates on them darkly. They have, he decides, been spoilt. He has been separated forever from their sweetness. He lets the tea go cold. When it grows dark he returns to the house and pours it down the sink, and places the biscuits back in their tin. (43-44).
I really like that moment. To me, it works as a standalone scene or a short story. It’s a scene that clearly expresses a particular kind of petty drama and the tensions of self-interest and relationship-building. It’s also a way of making use of the plethora of characters in the book in a way that feels self-contained and authentic.
One of my issues with the book is that I don’t really care about anybody other than the two main characters, and even then somewhat minimally. Thomas’ extended family is introduced; parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, and so on. Mostly, I had a hard time distinguishing who was who—they all get introduced essentially at once and there were very few actual events to build an understanding of their lives. I think part of the point of the book, actually, is that none of the characters are particularly likeable. Tonie comes across as cold and superior, with the added insult of having an affair that is never addressed. From a plot perspective, the awful secrets of the book don’t seem to matter much. The fact that there is a secret is the point itself.
I’m not giving up on Cusk by any means—her more recent work has been some of the most captivating work I’ve read lately—but I will say, The Bradshaw Variations just didn’t “hit the same.”
Nonetheless, happy reading!
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