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    Arlington Park
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    Arlington Park
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    Arlington Park
    Audiobook8 hours

    Arlington Park

    Written by Rachel Cusk

    Narrated by Jilly Bond

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Amid the leafy avenues and comfortable houses, the residents of Arlington Park live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. Set over the course of a single rainy day, this novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives: of Juliet, Amanda, Solly and Maisie. And of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Audio
    Release dateJan 8, 2007
    ISBN9781407407609
    Unavailable
    Arlington Park
    Author

    Rachel Cusk

    Rachel Cusk read English at New College, Oxford. Her first novel Saving Agnes won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993. She reviews regularly for The Times and TLS.

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    Reviews for Arlington Park

    3/5

    21 ratings20 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is more a series of interconnected short stories than a novel, which was a bit of a disappointment for me. This format means there's a tendency to not really develop each character or situation as well as might be done in a full-length work. Nonetheless, this is pretty good writing, I reckon. It's my first dose of Rachel Cusk and I will look for more of her work.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book is all about thirty-something women with kids, their various dissatisfactions, obsessions and innermost thoughts. Their relationships with their husbands, their children, and their female friends, and the awful way they treat eachother, intentionally or not.Nothing spectacular happens, it's all fairly mundane, but the author's skill is in teasing out the emotions underlying everyday life, and the fantastic dialogue she writes. Any one of the characters could be someone you know, and it's both witty and profound at the same time.My only criticism is that some of the comparisons she draws are a bit deep and overly obscure at times. Some sections I had to read over and over and still didn't grasp the point she was trying to make. Still, it made for highly intelligent reading, and with three words I had never even heard of within the first fifty pages, it improved my vocabulary too.
    • 2/5
      I started this book a couple times before it actually took. I never know whether it is me or the book that causes it to happen though. However, I am glad I read it when I did. This book looks into the suffocating, stagnant lives of several women in this upscale suburb of London. Being pregnant, looking at how I want to approach the transition to motherhood, and redefining my sense of self to include mother are all topics that have been on the forefront of my mind. This book provides a good reminder to make your own way and not resign yourself to letting the flow and expectations of other take you. I enjoyed this book although some would call it depressing. I thought it had some jewels of prose including the entire opening description of the book [The opening is actually worth reading just in the book store even if you don't buy or read the whole book]:-"He and Benedict talked, and Louisa and Juliet fed on the scraps of the men's conversation that fell to them."-"they were in their beds, already surrendered to tomorrow."I would recommend it only to certain individuals whose taste I knew well. I am not sure I would read it again, but was glad I read it once.
    • 4/5
      Looking at the ratings spread -- the entire gamut from 0.5 to 5.0 -- I would be tempted to call this a love-it-or-hate-it read, but ultimately I wonder if certain expectations are in play. Namely, that "women's fiction" should be filled with likable people and that domestic issues are inherently less serious than other issues. These women are handling existential questions, and I can't help but feel that if the author and characters were men the internal experiences detailed here would not be considered trivial. Makes me want to re-read Kate Chopin's -The Awakening-; I have a suspicion they would go together very well. Maybe, too, Wharton's -House of Mirth-.
    • 2/5
      Only made it about 80 pages into this one. Had heard great things about the writer and had high hopes (it started out well enough), but just felt dreary, repetitive, pointless, and bourgeois. Still, clearly a gifted writer though may need better subject matter and/or more interesting characters.
    • 2/5
      Meh, nothing special.
    • 2/5
      The story of one day in the life of some suburban housewives in England, their thoughts on life in general and the choices they made that brought them to the place where they are maried and living in a suburb, taking care of kids and a house and shopping at the mall and having dinner parties. Excellent writing but more along the lines of the characters speaking in a stream of consciousness mode with no real plot or story development.
    • 2/5
      Oh, that's all we needed - another novel about middle-class women and their lives on some nice estate in the south-east whose lives we have great trouble empathising with. What a disappointment.
    • 5/5
      Rachel Cusk has a wonderful way with metaphor and phrasing. Her writing is a joy to read. Arlington Park does a lovely job of peering below the surface of a handful of suburban women in the outskirts of London in a sympathetic but humorous way. I highly recommend.
    • 1/5
      This book was so incoherent and dull, with so many over-worked sentences that I couldn't finish it. It's really rare for me to give up on a book - and this one is only 240 pages long. I felt like the author had just discovered the suburban neurosis that was such a focus of feminist writings in the 70's.
    • 4/5
      Arlington Park features an assortment of women in a London suburb who are connected only by their chosen roles and their ambivalence about same. They all have kids and just about all seem to resent the lives they have chosen (some more passively than others) and the traps they have walked into. The book reminds me a bit of Nancy Friday's The Womens Room (except I read that about 25 years ago and could be remembering it wrong) where women suddenly wake up to the fact that they are limited by tradtional roles and they want out. Except the women in Arlington Park have had the benefit of the last 40 years of change and still decided to go "retro" as if being a suburban Mom now would be any more satisfying than it was in the 1950's. The book is frustrating for this reason; these women should know better. They have more or less drifted into a dull suburb when London beckons. Cusk packs a lot into a short book and her character development is surprisingly good given that each character gets about a chapter. Women reading this may recognize some of these characters in their own friends - from the self-centered, extroverted Christine who speaks her mind nomatter what, to the depressed Maisie who has figured out that modern life is going to destroy the planet and is not shy about expressing her anger to the piggy people in the big cars. My favorite chapter was about a couple with 3 kids and a fourth on the way who decide to bring in some extra cash renting a spare room to language students from a nearby school. Each tenant brings something different to the table and the mother can't help but compare her life to theirs, not always with satisfaction. It is a good vehicle for understanding that we don't really see ourselves clearly when we run with the herd because we don't distinguish ourselves from the group. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to women of any age. P.S. By the way, I never read the other reviews until I write my own, and having just read them all I would have to agree the book was depressing overall. And there was way too much rain.
    • 4/5
      Not much happens in this book; like a lot of the things I've been reading lately, it's mostly just "middle class women are vaguely dissatisfied with their lives now that they have children", but this is a pretty nice example of the type. It's well written, the characters seem well-rounded. I found this a relaxing read, despite the cringingly ignorant things some of the characters came out with.
    • 2/5
      OK, this Author can write, and write beautifully, but why on earth should she chooses to write about these selfish, angry, and desperately unhappy housewives its beyond me. I had no sympathy or empathy for any of the characters in this novel, except perhaps for poor pregnant Solly - who only appears once and has no interaction with the other characters - maybe that's why I actually liked her - she did not stoop to their mean and vicious level. The way these women treat their husbands - geez! Juliet calls hers a murderer and Christine hisses at her husband " You're useless, you are". Nice - I'd sure like to come home to that everyday. I was hoping that the characters moods would pick up towards the end of their day - they all started out having a tough morning with children, work etc. I was hoping it would all come together for them and that they could resolve some of their maternal angst, but sadly this did not happen. What I like about being an early reviewer for LibraryThing is that I get a chance to read books that I would perhaps not normally pick up, so I appreciate the chance to have read it even though I really didn't like it much.
    • 3/5
      I received a copy of Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program, and am grateful I was given the chance to read and review this book.One of the blurbs on the back cover states, “Cusk’s frank acknowledgement of maternal ambivalence is rare and wonderful.” The quote is from a review in Entertainment Weekly. As the mother of two boys in elementary school, I can certainly relate to maternal ambivalence, and I found myself understanding and relating to some of the characters’ feelings, and a few of the situations depicted in the novel. But while parts of the book were enjoyable, the overall picture was disappointing. Each chapter focuses on a different mother living in the London suburb of Arlington Park. There is some interaction between some of these “main characters,” but not enough to help the novel cohere as it should.A couple of the main characters are central to two chapters, most to only one. The first mother introduced, Juliet Randall, ends her first chapter on page 42, and doesn’t appear again until page 158. The second mother, Amanda Clapp, is not seen again after her chapter ends. In the middle of the book, we meet Solly Kerr-Leigh, who is expecting her fourth child. We learn that she and her husband let out their spare room to foreign students; they’re on their third boarder, an Italian woman named Paola. Solly’s chapter was one of my favorites, yet when I got to the end of the book, I realized that she’d had no interaction with the other main characters, that her story was the most self-contained. I enjoyed it, but couldn’t understand why it was in the novel. All the other chapters present the women’s experiences over one rainy day in and around Arlington Park, while Solly’s includes scenes from several different days, and ends after the birth of her baby. It’s like a good short story stuck into the middle of a novel where it doesn’t belong.The mother I liked the least is the one with the most “page time,” in that she has a small role in one chapter, a larger role in another, and gets two chapters of her own. After finishing the chapter where Christine Lanham and two other moms go to the mall, I became disillusioned with the book and didn’t pick it up for a while. When they arrive at the mall, Maisie, newly relocated to Arlington Park from London, sees caravans of gypsies living off to the side of the mall. She says, “What a place to have to live. Right where people come to pick up their sofas.” Christine’s response to this is, “I don’t think they’re really doing any harm. … At least they’re out of the way here. I’m sure the police would move them if they caused any trouble.” Maisie replies, “They’re people.” Christine continues to prove herself the most self-absorbed of the main characters as the book goes on. She is given more dialogue than the other moms, and tends to have less tact. In her company, the book becomes tiresome. I would have preferred a more cohesive novel, and would have been glad to hear more about Solly, Juliet, or Maisie. But, as Christine is the main character of the last chapter, it was with relief that I finished the book and closed the pages.
    • 3/5
      Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk is certainly a beautifully written book. The sentences are beautifully crafted and descriptions so well done I definitely could picture the scenes, the people, and the area. However, the story itself is quite depressing. The reader views one day in the lives of several women living in Arlington Park, what appears to be an upscale suburb of London. These housewives are so dissatisfied with their lives that one wonders why they continue in this lifestyle. There is no instance of joy or happiness. Husbands are seen as too demanding and squashing the lives out of their wives. Children are seen simply as a nuisance, just one more thing that is holding these women back. No one seems to have a plan to make things better. As I said, it is beautifully written and easy to read. It just left me in a rather black mood.
    • 1/5
      Ugh I hated this novel. All the women seemed to hate their lives and their kids. If you hate your life so much, change it!!!!! Grrr...I was just horrified by this novel.
    • 1/5
      The Boston Globe calls this book: "Hideously funny...a novel with a sense of rightness at it's core and a narrative intelligence so swift and piercing it can take your breath away." If I may borrow from the esteemed author of that quote and just take out the word FUNNY and add in DEPRESSING, then we may agree. The first quarter of the book had me wishing I had doubled up on my dose of anti-depressants. The rest of the book had me wishing I could just take some and cram them down the authors throat and have her lighten up a bit. The first chapter and the use of rain as a metaphor made me want to run and get my umbrella and beat someone with it. Throughout this book rain kept rearing its ugly head...it's England so one would imagine rain is to be expected and not used as this author did...like a battering ram to get her point across.The characters, well that's another story, they are fairly well written yet I had no sympathy for these crabby, cranky, mean annoying, whiny, air headed, depressed women. I saw no character growth, although would one expect any in a 24 hour time frame? *sigh* I would, or at least I would like to be able to empathize with at least one of them. I'm very glad that this was not a book that I paid for, since I would have to go back to the book store and demand my money back. I have this rule; books need to, at the very least entertain me and take me out of my own life for the duration. This book just made me wish that I was cleaning my toilets and not reading it. PS - I was very worried that I was going to be the only one that couldn't find something good/entertaining/redeeming in this novel, thank you other reviewers for not leaving my bum hanging out there all alone.Dianne
    • 3/5
      I can't decide if I love this book or hate it.But I couldn't put it down.While I found the premise of the book to be of interest, and found a lot of the writing to be insightful and quite beautiful, I could not bring myself to feel the pain these women were in such angst about.
    • 3/5
      Desperate Housewives invade uppity British Suburb. (ok, slightly tongue in cheek here) I think that Rachel is really talented and I definitely would not rule out reading other efforts by her.That being said...I didn't enjoy the book as much as I thought I would...during this particular time in our country (or world) it just all seems so trivial to get bogged down in. And depressing. I thought there was incredible character development...I certainly had insight into their thoughts...I just ceased wanting to KNOW their thoughts.Thanks again to LibraryThing for including me in the early reviewers program. Whether I enjoy the book or not, I am grateful for the opportunity.
    • 3/5
      Set in a moderatly wealthy London Suburs, the novel follows the day of a group of moms. They all feel somehow imprisoned in their life, they all are looking for a better way to be. They shop, the chat they drink coffee, but they don't seem able to help each other in this struggle for a more meaningful life.The husbands may be percieved as the enemies at times, but none of the women chose to rebel against that: the tension is high, but no relief solution is found. Motherhood itself is a critic condition: children are ourselves, children are our future, but children stop us and limit us in endless ways.It's not difficult to find a piece of yourself, if you are a woman, in the struggling ladies of Arlington Park. It's with relief, though, that in the end you are able to go back to your, as struggling but less meaningless, life.