Readers of the Outline trilogy (2014–18) will recognise in M’s story the silhouette of another story: one told by a creative writing student named Jane to the narrator, Faye, among the dust sheets of a gruelling home renovation in Transit (2016). There is an encounter with a self-absorbed male photographer who leads her on, and then there is an encounter with art – in Jane’s case, with the paintings of the American artist Marsden Hartley – that detonates, in the wake of arousal and rejection, ‘a complete personal revolution’.

Much of Rachel Cusk’s eleventh novel, Second Place, has the feeling of a new house furnished with old furniture. Cusk’s familiar theme is evident: it might be summed up as the problems self-actualisation presents, given the multitude of real and imagined obstacles, especially those contrived by the people we love, or should love. Played out by a smaller ensemble of characters in the claustrophobic environment of two adjacent houses in an isolated location, however, this novel reaches a more fevered pitch. Familiar, too, is the manner of Second Place’s telling. The Outline trilogy is structured as a series of reported conversations between Faye, who resembles Cusk herself, and a revolving door of people – often male, foreign, and strangers – whom she meets everywhere, from planes to writers’ festivals. Second Place is also explicitly a conversation, albeit in written form. M addresses her narrative about her interactions with L to an interlocutor called Jeffers, who never comes into focus but whose name is invoked 124 times throughout the novel.

Who Jeffers is exactly is explained by the author’s note at the end of the book. Here, Cusk acknowledges her novel’s ‘debt’ to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos (1932), a memoir that was written with the stated purpose of effecting a belated introduction between the American poet Robinson Jeffers and D.H. Lawrence, whom Luhan claims to have ‘willed’ to her ranch in New Mexico in the years before his death in 1930. The word ‘debt’ doesn’t go nearly far enough to describe the kind of borrowings Cusk makes from Lorenzo in Taos. The most arresting scenes in the novel have their precursors in Luhan’s memoir, sometimes down to the level of the individual sentence. Even M’s overuse of exclamation marks, so jarring given the usual equipoise of Cusk’s prose, turns out to be another idiosyncratic feature of Luhan’s book.

There are some conspicuous differences: L is more Lucian Freud than D.H. Lawrence, and his companion Brett – ravishing, expensive, adrift – is more Lady Brett Ashley from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises than Dorothy Brett, whose own time on the ranch in Taos, if Luhan is to be believed, was spent intruding on every conversation Lawrence was involved in with her enormous hearing trumpet. Cusk’s tighter reconfiguration of the constellation of characters in Lorenzo in Taos does not alter the fact that Second Place replicates its deeper drama: in Luhan’s words, the ‘tides and currents that comprise the relationships between people’, and in particular the ‘mysterious effluvium’ or ‘spiritual union’ that exists when artist meets appreciator.

Arguably, Cusk has been drawing on neglected modernists for models since the Outline trilogy. Its self-effacing, passive narrator would appear to be a trick learned from Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin: leave a void where the main character should be and, counter-intuitively, ingratiation with the reader follows. It has proved a handy remedy for an author who has struggled to suppress a note of superciliousness in her writing, and thus has tended to stir up hostility in response. With the Outline trilogy, Cusk at last achieved both critical acclaim and a devoted readership. But the question remains: why Mabel Dodge Luhan and why Lorenzo in Taos?

One answer can be found in the story of Luhan herself, a woman of raging curiosity and huge energy who, nonetheless, could only envision herself as an enabler and not a creator. In Lorenzo in Taos, Luhan writes movingly of her inability to ventilate her impressions of the world – a ‘Leyden Jar charged to the brim’ that might ‘destroy’ her – and her desire to ‘mother’ Lawrence’s writing by gifting them to him for ‘translation’. In Second Place, M wants L to capture the marshes as she sees them in his painting in order to make her real to herself. Both women’s wills, though strong, must be directed through others to achieve fruition. Taking second place is, they accept, a woman’s lot.

The Lawrence connection brings into focus something that has been true about Cusk all along: that human relations in her books are, despite the gentility of her typical surfaces, violent struggles of life and death. There is no personal interaction – not even the most intimate ones, such as that of a parent and a child – that does not entail some exercising of power, and therefore some need to submit or resist. Luhan and Lawrence were, above all, people who could and did change. Nothing in their origins could have predicted their destinations: geographically, ideologically, psychically. Second Place, ultimately, might be understood as a celebration of this intrepidity for radical change. It is the type of change that is central to the marsh’s ineffability: ‘I have walked on the marsh every day for these past years,’ writes M to L, ‘and it’s never looked like the same place twice’. In channelling Luhan and Lawrence, Cusk is willing herself to embrace yet another change; as M acknowledges, change may be desired but it’s impossible to effect on our own.