Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation starkly illustrates what comes after motherhood, at least for Cusk, in an abstract style that will speak closely to some while leaving others wishing for a more sequential retrospection of Cusk's marriage and subsequent divorce … Cusk does write intimately about her family's life with, and without, her husband – just not in the voyeuristic manner that our society has grown used to...Whether there is a defining incident that caused Cusk's separation from her husband we don't know, and nor should we necessarily care. Cusk's focus is on the pain and grief that accompanies the deterioration of a marriage and a life built together, specifically when it involves children ... As philosophical as this memoir may be, Cusk also deftly balances exposing her depleted mental state with her physical deterioration.
What happens when a marriage collapses? When you are no longer husband and wife, but just yourself, just a woman?...From this withered position, Cusk struggles early in the book to understand what went wrong. She had, after all, made efforts in her marriage to maintain her own identity, writing full-time while her husband watched their children … The writing is full of feeling, and even the stylistic oddities contribute to a sense of wandering and solitude, which, speaking from my own experience, feels entirely appropriate. For unlike marriage and motherhood, divorce has few playbooks.
Its title, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, is a bit of a misnomer. There is, in fact, not much marriage in here... What follows includes a lot of solitude, smoking and near-starvation. Cusk more or less stops eating and serves her two daughters their supper on trays … Beyond the easy knocks, Cusk is asking herself, and the reader, to think about deeper questions, most notably: where is the authority when the authority of men has gone? In Greek myths she finds a brutal, passionate world suited to her new outlook … The (overwhelmingly female) critics of Cusk’s confessional books miss the point: she’s not out to be our friend. She is not seeking approval. We must accept her, if we do, simply as an extraordinary writer of the female experience. She puts into words what is normally consigned to the realm of the non-verbal.
There’s no doubt that Aftermath is a work of narcissism, a deeply personal account of Cusk’s shattered marriage that leaves little room for her husband’s side of the story. But there is truth in this narcissism. As Cusk writes, in the depths of bereavement, seeing outside of yourself is nigh impossible … Aftermath is a way of combing through the debris after the storm passes. It is the dark ages after the barbarians have stormed the castle, the chaos when a civilization implodes. There is comfort in the wreckage … Reading Aftermath feels like being trapped in a trance. Cusk’s prose is heavy and atmospheric.
In Aftermath, Cusk goes easy on the details of the actual separation. ‘My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously,’ she confides. But she doesn’t say why...The lack of detail is the book’s most glaring omission. How can you write a memoir about divorce without saying what caused it? Without owning up to or trying to come to terms with one’s role in it? ‘Monstrously’ is a powerful word. Cusk may hate stories, but inevitably her readers will want to know: What’s the story? … As a whole this book doesn’t work. Cusk’s biggest problem is her main character. Her self-absorption is still acute. The way she analyzes her every mood does not make her likable. Nor does it make for an interesting narrative. Frankly, the book is often tedious.
[Cusk] dissects the breakup of her marriage and, as the title tells us, what followed for her and her daughters. The book is part puzzle and part disappointment. The image on the cover is a cracked plate, and as it opens, it’s as if Cusk has picked up the jagged shards and driven them into the heart of her marriage, to make sure it’s really dead … Maybe such an overwrought indictment of marriage is plausible, or even necessary, for Cusk in the throes of her gory divorce. But I wonder if she’ll wake up in a few years and read these pages as artifact rather than felt truth. I also wonder if being in the throes of a breakup just tends to undo good writers.
...a restlessly erudite portrait of post-marital strife. The book's satisfactions lie in its cold-eyed probing of the ‘aftermath,’ which, as she tells us, is a second sowing after the initial harvest … Like the Frankenstein monster, Cusk is on the outside of domestic life, looking in - peering at families in church, trying to remember what a family dinner felt like, feeling an odd mixture of liberation and stigma … She intellectualizes, yes, but this book is a solace to anybody who has dwelt in post-familial wastes. As she points out, every civilization has in it the seeds of its own destruction, but wastelands have their own beauty, their own potential for rejuvenation.
Cusk'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.
Cusk chronicles the upheaval that follows divorce in a probing style that lays bare the divorce’s impact on herself and her family … Interspersed within the narrative are stories within stories, vivid scenes, and piercing observations. In this thought-provoking memoir, Cusk musters her considerable literary powers to mine a complex terrain filled with heartbreak and doubt.
In her third memoir, the author brings together elements of a well-constructed novel—it’s compelling and even thrilling, despite the fact that the story is unsurprising and banal (man meets woman, and they create a family; family falls apart; man, woman and children grieve)—and its novelistic feel is a credit to Cusk's literary risk-taking. She doesn't tell her tale straight; instead, she weaves in figures from ancient Greek drama (Oedipus, Antigone, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra) and thickens the bare-bones plot with striking, elaborate turns of phrase and powerful images … Bold, gripping, original and occasionally darkly funny.
