The eternal love triangle

It was an older novelist, Alice Thomas Ellis, who summed up the inescapable tragedy of life by noting that men love women, women love children and children love hamsters. There are no hamsters in Rachel Cusk's emotional map of parenthood, The Lucky Ones, but its pages are full of the mismatches of desire, interest, emotional commitment and dedication that occur whenever you find the real eternal triangle of life, the one that links men, women and children.

Cusk's characters know moments of happiness, but none of them is really happy. She gathers them loosely into a dance of five movements, each one centring on a different figure but linking peripheral characters from other stories.

Men and women drift in and out of focus, their contexts changing in a perpetually shifting pattern of resistance and surrender to the irresistible force that is fertility and family. Sometimes they surface long enough to ask a question - "Does having a child affect your capacity to love other people?" - or even to voice a theory, such as the columnist Serena, who "creates a fiction of domestic glory" while considering "how inequality runs through the veins of how we live together and love and reproduce".

But mostly, Cusk's approach is more visceral than that. Her characters are too swamped by irresistible forces to come up with coherent answers to their desperate questions. It is for us to watch their struggles and work them out for ourselves.

Her remarkable poetic gift for imagery keeps returning to two central themes. Characters find themselves suspended in the moment before everything changes forever, feeling "the alarm of someone who has dropped a plate and is watching it in the last seconds of its wholeness, before it hits the floor."

The other recurring image is of plant growth, like the smothering ivy tendrils of emotional need or the lack of growth in a character who feels herself rooted in her childhood "like a neglected plant that runs yards of stalk for every bloom".

Young adults are hit by the tenacious power with which small children cling to them, already seeking to build their security on parental foundations that Cusk shows are shaky and incapable of bearing the weight. This is not a book about the joy of families, but one which will be recognised by anyone who has children as being full of uncomfortable truth.

The first character, Kirsty, is childbearing simplified, like a monument. She is in prison and her child will be taken from her, but what she embodies is the overwhelming physical reality of the life coming through, the loss of ownership of the body, the elemental force of "the rock between her legs".

In the next story, six young adults go skiing, children left behind, and two of the men struggle with the loss of freedom and independent identity which fatherhood means to them.

The third story is haunted by loneliness and sterility. In story four, a great character, a self-deluding monster of a mother, reacts coldly to the birth of a new grandchild and perpetuates a mother-daughter struggle that began a generation earlier. Cusk allows some of her female characters to be swamped by the physical passion of mother for child, but here recognises the destructive power of the bond between parent and offspring, the ways in which love can be withheld and manipulated.