The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

There is a section in The Bradshaw Variations where one of the lead characters, Thomas Bradshaw, considers the objects in a room. Coming across a “tiny pair of headsets, unopened, coiled in their little plastic sacks like embryos,” he marvels that, “[t]hey came with a mobile phone that has since been upgraded. The headsets don’t fit the new phone. Yet they will last forever…” He recalls a pointless object that once sat on his office desk, bringing the worn seam of the object to mind perfectly. But when he comes across an old journal, the sketch of a woman inside does not trigger any memory. He drew the image, he knows that, but who was she?

The Bradshaw Variations follows Thomas and his wife through a year when they trade places; he stays at home on sabbatical while she leaves home for the workplace. While the book revolves around the members of Thomas’ extended family, the center of this story is Thomas. Slipped into a homemaker’s role, Thomas is lulled into new domestic rhythms. Time is measured by the demands of the members of his family, primarily his young daughter. With some time on his hands, Thomas indulges a life long passion for music and takes up the piano. His wife, Tonie, meanwhile, rediscovers a life without her family and her day job comes to mean autonomy. The book also follows Thomas’ parents and Thomas' brothers, the swaggering, successful Howard and bitter, alcoholic Leo. This novel is a portrait of the Bradshaw brothers, working against the leveling force of their parents’ judgments.

Cusk, the author of a controversial book about motherhood, is especially great at describing the interior lives of her characters. She is unsparing but there is nothing cruel in the writing. She does not fillet the characters to reveal them. Slights, misinterpretations, impenetrable distances that suddenly collapse into intimacy are given due significance. Cusk delivers the small and mundane moments of her characters’ lives with the precision of a modern-day Virginia Woolf.

“You should read happy books,” Thomas’ tenant, Olga, tells him. Olga is newly emigrated from Poland and the Bradshaws' domestic life, their shared anxiety, is a constant source of curiosity for Olga. “Why make life more difficult?” Thomas is at a loss. He thinks, “What is art? It is, perhaps a distillation of the difficulty….a kind of knowledge after the fact, a description of what cannot be known until it is lived, by which time it is too late to know it. When he plays the piano he is not living. He is describing what it lies beyond his own capacity to redeem.” He asks Olga if she reads happy books and she tells him that she reads magazines.

The book chronicles only a year in Brashaws' lives. At the end of the year, and the book, the characters are restored to what seems their rightful places. And that seems like the biggest injustice of all, that one would have rightful place, despite the complexity of his or her character.