Right from the start of the novel, though, there's something weird going on, with M's constant address of the story to someone called 'Jeffers', whose identity and relationship to the narrator is never revealed. A two-sentence note at the end of the book says that Second Place is a 'tribute to the spirit' of Mabel Dodge Luhan, the American patroness of the arts who endured D.H.Lawrence as a guest at her ranch in Taos in the 1920s. Having got this far – the end – without a whiff of this connection, any reader could be forgiven for thinking it unimportant, but some googling reveals that Cusk’s book is virtually a re-writing of Luhan’s, down to incidents, speeches, feelings, objects and names (for instance, Luhan has a partner called Tony, a friend called Brett and much of her memoir is addressed to the poet Robinson Jeffers).
