In the Fold

This book is so beautiful and fun. Cusk is a master at crystallizing experience, each moment sculpted with a loving, heightened awareness. Her unique use of metaphors, one breathlessly piled on after another, gives the impression that life is so dizzyingly rich it is beyond defining -- we learn about things by knowing what they are not. And yet we end up with a crystal-clear image. What a genius. My favorite writer. Thank you, Rachel Cusk, for loving life so much, and communicating your sense of its preciousness with your gorgeous writing.

The plot of this book concerns disillusion and dissolution: the growing disillusion that the narrator, Michael, feels toward the family of his former college buddy, and the looming possibility of the dissolution of his marriage. Neither prospect is much of a surprise. The family, which he'd once youthfully idealized, consists largely of fractured eccentrics, and his wife has seemingly come unhinged. Michael watches it all as if from a distance, outwardly passive (maddeningly so for his wife) but internally buffeted. The events are occasionally humorous but pointedly ordinary--farm chores, trips to the store, quick conversations. What's remarkable is the stage Cusk creates for these little dramas. Her imagery is extremely vivid. She pays close attention to light and shadow, for example, and nails her descriptions of both. She focuses on a steady procession of everyday details--jackets, buckets, fishing nets--and uses them to anchor the story in a very recognizable work-a-day world. This flat realism combines with Michael's candid interior monologue to create a mild, is-this-my-life? sort of existential dread that inhabits the quieter moments of the book. With its heavy shadows, odd details, and sense of a things wobbling slowly out of control, the book resembles a particularly vivid and profound dream. The themes Cusk explores, notably the tension between responsibility to self and responsibility to family, will stay with you long after you put this one in the bookshelf.

Michael, a British college student from a conservative background, is invited to attend a birthday party at his friend Adam Hanbury's country estate. The estate is called "Egypt," and to Michael, the place and the people are as exotic as any faraway country. Adam's large, messy family seems wonderfully witty and worldly. The Hanburys' world is idyllic, pastoral and bohemian, and Michael longs to be a part of it, especially when he sees the birthday girl, Caris, a free spirit who poses nude for the family's artist-in-residence: "She looked more extraordinary than any person I had seen before, although it is hard to say exactly why she gave this impression...She looked like a goddess." After Michael enjoys a too-brief kiss from Caris, the narrative flashes forward more than a decade. Now in his mid-thirties, living in Bath with his wife Rebecca and their three-year-old son Hamish, Michael seems to be enjoying an orthodox existence that is diametrically opposed to the Hanburys' bohemian lifestyle. Although Michael hasn't spoken to Adam in several years, he can't stop thinking about that one magical party. When a balcony on his ramshackle house (donated by his in-laws) collapses, nearly killing him, Michael decides to accept an invitation to visit the Hanburys again to help with the spring lambing while Adam's father is in the hospital. Arriving at Egypt with his young son in tow, Michael is surprised to discover that all is not as it seemed at this country estate. Adam himself is now married and living nearby; Caris is a voluptuous hippie living on an all-women's commune; Adam's mother and stepmother, who seem on the surface to be friends, secretly loathe and resent each other; and Adam's ailing father is not entirely the benevolent patriarch he seems. As Michael grows increasingly disillusioned not only with the Hanburys but also with his own troubled marriage, he must figure out how --- or whether --- to return to his former life. Set in a manor house in the English countryside, IN THE FOLD has the feeling of early-twentieth century comedies of manners, with some distinctly modern twists. Although the novel does have its moments of levity, its brand of humor is definitely dark, and it can be difficult to find any characters to like (including the narrator himself). Nevertheless, Rachel Cusk's writing is tight and biting, and the novel's characterizations are complex, nuanced, and sometimes a little uncomfortable --- much like family life in the real world. --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

Michael is just a young man, when Adam Hanbury, his best friend at University, invites him to his home of Egypt to celebrate Caris, his younger sister's eighteenth birthday. Of course, it is not the country of Egypt in which the Hanbury family call home, but Egypt Hill, an estate just outside of rural Doniford, a highly quaint and contoured town, clustered around a small bay. The Hanbury's, this dotty group of eccentrics immediately entrance Michael and he's hugely impressed by their freedom of the ideas and the glamorous exuberance of their parties. Michael begins to feel as though life's possibilities are opening up before him. He readily admits that he's not particularly materialistic, but he likes to surround himself with those who are, and also those who have a penchant towards status. Michael prides himself on the fact that the Hanbury's privileged circumstances have left him with the illusion that he was indifferent to them. Fifteen years later, he encounters them again, but both their circumstances have irremovably changed. Michael is a lawyer for a local charity, and now lives in Bath, and is married to Rebecca, who grew up in a similarly unrestrained family. Her arty bourgeois parents are continually conferring on the couple one long strand of human intercourse, existing in a condition of something like sustained embroilment. Rebecca is now struggling to free herself from the limitless freedom her parents have afforded her. Yet it is this freedom that she actually wants, most particularly the freedom to express herself. Michael willingly acknowledges that it is the practical, financial and social entanglements that attracted him to her family in the first pace, as it did with the Hanbury's. Lately Rebecca has been moving away from Michael and he's at a loss as to how to connect with her, when Adam Hanbury invites him back to visit Egypt to participate in a season of sheep birthing, he jumps at the opportunity and takes Hamish, his four-year-old son with him. Returning to the place where so many of his dreams were formed, Michael hopes to find a little clarity, but instead he is met with an altogether unexpected state of affairs. The Hanbury family is now fraught with tension and misspent opportunity. Adam's father, Paul has recently been taken to hospital and is resentful of his flirtatious ex-wife Audrey and the way his current wife Vivian has been running the farm. Paul is a crabby, irascible and misogynistic pill, who believes women should be seen and not heard, and constantly worries about the future of the ramshackle farm. Vivian, for her part, feels as though she's descending into a well of blackness most of the time, while Caris has become a type of left of center feminist, who spurns riding in cars and now likes to swan around impersonating a Roman goddess. Michael recognizes in her a presence, something that spoke to his own weakness for the transitory and the dispossessed. Meanwhile, Lisa, Adam's materialistic w

Michael's family adheres to rigid social customs so he knows little else. That is until he attends the eighteenth birthday party of Caris Hanbury, the sister of his university roommate Adam. He finds an entirely different world at Egypt Hill. Years later, Michael resides in Bath with his edgy spouse Rebecca and their troubled withdrawn young son Hamish. They live in a beautiful house given to them by her parents the artistic amoral Alexanders, control freaks who in their eccentric way live an inflexible lifestyle that they expect everyone in their circle, including Michael and Hamash, to follow the lack of conformity that is paradoxically similar yet different from the Hanburys. Worried about his son, Michael takes Hamash with him on a pilgrimage to Egypt Hill where he first learned to break out of the binds of society, but nothing remains the same as he learns you can't go home. He always thought of the place since his first visit but realizes that his dream place is just an illusion. IN THE FOLD is a deep look at relationshsips between people that will keep the audience pondering after finishing the novel what truly makes a family besides DNA. The story line lacks action as the plot concentrates on varying individuals interacting or not with some turning destructive and others illogical. Not for everyone, Rachel Cusk provides a potent look at the essence of an individual just surviving and mostly living in a society trying to file them in the appropriate drawer; some will rebel while others will quietly acquiesce. Harriet Klausner