PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThough the metaphor is now a little tired, Rachel Cusk’s new essay collection, Coventry, flips it over to articulate her own desires for writing. In \'Making Home,\' one of the book’s best essays, she imagines houses to be like novels, rather than the other way around ... Cusk throws out the furniture, but instead of standing alone in the newly spacious interior she then walks to the curb and describes how everything landed ... Cusk’s works give us something like the novel of exteriority: they consist almost entirely of recounted talk and external description, so we judge the characters not by what they think but by how they look and what they say ... It is a sturdy and worthwhile collection of previously published material, but it won’t change anyone’s mind about Rachel Cusk. It will not convert any of the haters, nor will it leave any of her fans thinking that she’s flown the coop ... Coventry might best be read as a publisher’s guidebook on Cusk Country’s dominant themes and narrative strategies ... The \'tension\' that colors every aspect of one’s own identity and shared relationships but that is \'difficult to locate\' in language: that is the meat of Cusk’s most riveting work ... If this is what you look for in Cusk, then Coventry delivers ... Fans of Cusk’s prose and authorial perspective, her cutting wit and inimitable turns of phrase, will enjoy these essays.
