The Bradshaw Variations: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

Overview

“Astonishing . . . The Bradshaw Variations is a timely, necessary story.” —Elle

Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy-enough daughter, and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at work and Thomas agrees to become a stay-at-home dad.

While Thomas is suddenly faced with the daily silence of an empty house, Tonie finds herself alive to previously unimagined possibilities. And at the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.

The seventh novel by the acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, Rachel Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations is a lyrical, subversive tale of a marriage unraveling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250828194
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.47(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place; the trilogy Outline, Transit, Kudos; the essay collection Coventry; the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath; and several other novels: Saving Agnes (winner of the Whitbread Award), The Temporary, The Country Life (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Lucky Ones, In the Fold, Arlington Park and The Bradshaw Variations.

Reading Group Guide

About this Guide
The following author biography and list of questions about The Bradshaw Variations are intended as resources to aid individual readers and book groups who would like to learn more about the author and this book. We hope that this guide will provide you a starting place for discussion, and suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach The Bradshaw Variations.

About the Book
Since quitting work to look after his eight-year-old daughter, Alexa, Thomas Bradshaw has found solace and nourishment in his daily piano study. But his parents and in-laws wonder why he has swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife. And how can this be good for their daughter?

Tonie is increasingly seduced away from domestic life by the headier world of work, where long-forgotten memories of ambition are awakened. She finds herself outside their tight family circle, alive to previously unimaginable possibilities.

Over the course of a year full of crisis and revelation, we follow their fortunes, and The Bradshaw Variations shows Rachel Cusk to be a lyrically subversive writer at the height of her powers.

About the Author
Rachel Cusk was born in 1967. She is the author of the memoirs A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother and The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, and of six novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Temporary; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award; In the Fold; and Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. In 2003, Cusk was chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in Brighton, England.

1. What does the style and state of Tonie and Thomas's home say about them? Why are the differences between their home and Howard and Claudia's significant?

2. Why does Thomas think he has both special knowledge of Howard and yet does not understand him?

3. What gives Leo such feelings of "randomness" and discomfort at the gathering at their parents' home?

4. Why is Claudia so frustrated by Howard's illness? Is she lacking a vital sympathy for him?

5. How does the revelation of Thomas having left Clare for Tonie change your perspective on their relationship? Do you agree with Tonie that it is odd that Thomas claims never to think about Clare?

6. Both Tonie and Thomas's parents openly express disapproval of their new arrangement of Thomas at home and Tonie working. Is this rude, or just a natural generational reaction? How do their comments affect Thomas and Tonie?

7. Alexa often becomes a symbol of both purity and art, and is thus clung to by her parents. Does Tonie feel the loss of no longer being in "possession" of her daughter? Why does Thomas feel guiltily glad when she leaves for school?

8. Why does Thomas cry in front of his mother after he helps her move the boxes out of her house?

9. How would you characterize the relationship Claudia has with Lottie?

10. What do Thomas and Tonie's flirtations with other people reveal about their states of mind? What makes Tonie give in to Dieter?

11. What do you think about Olga's conclusions regarding the "normality" of love between a man and woman, that it means a "rigid . . . constricted, invisible life" (192)?

12. How would you describe Claudia's and Howard's reactions to Skittle's death? Why did the dog seem to add so much strain to their lives?

13. Are Tonie and Thomas guilty of anything, excluding their behavior on the day of Alexa's hospitalization?

14. The novel reads as a series of episodes, jumping between characters, viewpoints and time. Which character or episode made the greatest impression on you, and why?

Editorial Reviews

Astonishing . . . Like a genius gem cutter, Cusk continues to brazenly flout the pure realism that dominates current literary fiction in favor of a Woolfean approach that uses style and sensory impressionism to chisel out inner turmoil. The Bradshaw Variations is a timely, necessary story . . . I'm escaping to the metaphorical forest with a pile of Cusk novels. I hope you'll be brave enough to join me.” —Miranda Purves, Elle

“Again and again [Cusk] provides that primal joy of literature: the sense of things being seen afresh.” —James Lasdun, The Guardian

“A virtuoso . . . [Cusk's] interiors whisper and shiver, as if Virginia Woolf had flitted through . . . It is the author's mix of scorn and compassion that is so bracing. Sometimes she complicates simple things, snarling them in a cat's cradle of abstraction, but just as often, a sentence rewards with its absolute and unexpected precision . . .” —Hilary Mantel, The Guardian

“Frighteningly sharp . . . [I was] affected and moved, [and] at times I just wanted to punch the air in a frenzy of delighted recognition . . . Every single one of these honestly drawn and heartsinkingly recognizable characters . . . gave me real, crackling pleasure . . . This isn't the first novel of Cusk's to make me laugh out loud, but it is the first to have really moved me . . . Her triumph is to make us laugh at, but also I think forgive, ourselves.” —Julie Myerson, Financial Times

“Brilliant . . . Cusk is marvellous on the way that one generation watches another and it is her own watchfulness that makes her novel so special. She combines restlessness with absolute stillness; she misses nothing . . . In a sense, [this book] is a modern Mrs. Dalloway . . . I enjoyed everything about this dazzling performance of a book. I was engrossed, entertained and converted . . . This, Rachel Cusk's seventh novel, is her best.” —Kate Kellaway, The Observer (London)

“Cusk, who won Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize for her debut novel, 'Saving Agnes,' is a first-rate writer, caustically intelligent and sharply observant. . . Pretty much every page [of The Bradshaw Variations] gleams with Cusk's darkly humorous powers of observation.” —Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review

“Cusk is mercilessly acute in her dissection of the Bradshaw family. Their failures are exposed by her scalpel prose. It makes the reader feel rather protective of them, which is a clever trick. It allows Cusk's characters human breath beyond the high art of her writing . . . I know I will keep thinking about them.” —Helen Brown, The Daily Telegraph

“Cusk has a gift for wrapping minute, piercing observations on domestic life in lyrical passages that consistently bring fresh insight to the time-worn question.” —The A.V. Club

“Like Franzen's The Corrections, Cusk's narrative captures the emotional life of its characters, complete with downfalls and compromises. While the chapters move swiftly, Cusk takes time to pause over and unravel intimate moments and uncover the illogical paths of human relationships.” —Heather Paulson, Booklist

From the Publisher