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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Cressida Connolly
The only perfect thing in this imperfect world is the prose that describes it. Cusk has always been a writer of exquisite style, and this novel shows her at her very best.
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Outstanding
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Library Journal Barbara Hoffert
[Cusk’s characters aren't] always good company--this reviewer threw the book down halfway through, swearing to get out of town--but in her luminous if disturbing study Cusk has done important work in giving them voice. Highly recommended. [1 Nov 2006, p.67]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Their plight is an old story, but Cusk makes it incisively vivid. [16 Oct 2006, p.31]
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Outstanding
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Atlantic Monthly Christina Schwarz
Cusk's writing [is] so diamond sharp and so lushly metaphorical that even had this substantial book no substance, one would read it happily.
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Favorable
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The Observer Viv Groskop
Resolutely anti-escapist, this is an uncomfortable but essential book that reads like a depressive's grim celebration of life's frustrations.
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Favorable
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Christian Science Monitor Heller McAlpin
Cusk's vision isn't cheery, but then, Virginia Woolf isn't exactly heartwarming, either.
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Favorable
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Booklist Mary Ellen Quinn
As she did in "The Country Life" (2000) and other previous works, Cusk shows herself to be a master of incisive, unsentimental domestic fiction. [15 Nov 2006, p.31]
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Favorable
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LA Weekly Brendan Bernhard
The sheer zest with which Cusk sets down her characters’ thoughts, dreams, frustrations and tirades...makes for exhilarating, sometimes hilarious reading.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Jane Smiley
Cusk's glory is her style, cold and hard and devastatingly specific, empathetic but not sympathetic.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Vendela Vida
When Cusk is at her best--and she often is in this book--she writes scenes that are both funny and furious.
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Favorable
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Sydney Morning Herald Stephanie Bishop
Cusk's power as a writer lies in her ability to pinpoint the large and savage feelings that accompany small acts. It is this elegant precision, and her dark humour, that makes Arlington Park such a disturbing account of what appear to be such ordinary lives.
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Favorable
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The Guardian James Lasdun
The many passages where observation and analysis, detail and mood, move gracefully in step with each other, powerfully illuminating the characters' lives, do much to compensate for [Arlington Road’s] flaws.
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Favorable
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The Independent Catherine Taylor
[Cusk's] relentlessly elegant prose can be seen as pretentious...her characters are monstrous, their world-view narrow and intense. Yet she is, along with Helen Simpson, one of the most intelligent current interpreters of domestic life.
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Mixed
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The Independent Christina Patterson
Arlington Park feels relentless--relentlessly ponderous and relentlessly precious.
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Mixed
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The New York Times S. Kirk Walsh
There is little daylight, only rain, rain and more rain. Not exactly the kind of place a reader wants to linger--only long enough to appreciate this author's sharp wit and commanding prose.
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
One of the problems with this vastly intelligent novel is that the emptiness of these women's lives is a fate suffered by their plot line as well.
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Cusk's frank acknowledgment of maternal ambivalence is rare and wonderful; so, too, is her ability to pinpoint and articulate nebulous emotional states. But Cusk's group portrait in Arlington Park suffers from the sameness of her characters.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Accomplished, honest and uncompromising, but not a whole lot of fun. [1 Nov 2006, p.1090]
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Mixed
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The Spectator Diana Hendry
Splendid writing, then, but somehow as joyless and loveless as the lives of these five women whose children one pities. [16 Sep 2006]
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Mixed
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The New Yorker
Unfortunately, Cusk can’t decide whether she wants to satirize these women or swaddle them in viscous, Woolfian prose, for which she has a definite talent.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Lucy Ellmann
The book eventually becomes one long postpartum gripe, though neither humane nor funny enough to be enjoyable as social satire.
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