The Power of Refusal

New novels by Rachel Cusk and Jhumpa Lahiri explore women’s struggle to withdraw and create.

- By Claire Dederer

My father died this spring. Right up until he went into the hospital, at age 88, he lived alone in a small houseboat at the end of a long pier, bare of conventional creature comforts but filled with his books and maps and hiking gear. My brother and I had worried: “Dad, you could have a heart attack and fall in the lake.” Better that than give up his freedom, he’d said. To other people, his ascetic life might not have looked like freedom. It might’ve looked like emptiness. His life seemed to be made up of things he didn’t have. But to him, the not-having was the same thing as his freedom.

I sat by my father’s hospital bed for two months. As he slept, he gripped my left hand and I held a book in my right. Toward the end of my vigil, I read new novels by Rachel Cusk and Jhumpa Lahiri. The protagonists of both books have built lives that are full of refusals, as my father did. But there is one important difference—these first-person narrators are women, and they wear their refusals awkwardly; my dad wore him with a sovereign dignity. Refusal, like so much else, turns out to be the prerogative of men. The narrator of Cusk’s Second Place, identified only as M, says it plainly, addressing a male painter who is identified as L: “ ‘You’ve always pleased yourself,’ I said, somewhat bitterly, because it did seem to me that that was what he had done, and what most men did.” M, by contrast, struggles to please herself, apart from others.