MixedThe GuardianCusk's declared interest in the truth does not encompass the low detail of how her marriage actually came apart. ‘An important vow of obedience was broken,’ she tells us, in a brisk aside that implies adultery but not by whom … But the facts, in any case, are not the same as the truth, may even be tangential to it. The truth, for Cusk, lies elsewhere, not in story but in history, in the notion of aftermath that she helpfully identifies (lest we fail to) as ‘the book's elemental theme’ … She should have thinned the clots of classical myth, and dumped altogether the bizarre final chapter, with its utterly disingenuous novelistic trick of resolution. This is writerly greed, swooping on everything and wringing meaning from it, transforming it into something else rather than just letting it be.