Again like Cusk, who has called her most recent novel, "Second Place," an attempt to write a painting, Savaş is alert to tricks of the eye. The narrator draws parallels between the play of subtly contrasting tones around her and her mutable, movable feelings toward Agnes. Nothing is permanent, not even a painting on the bookshelf that becomes a minor fixation. She notices that "the tree in the picture appeared more crooked each day." And just as the tree's appearance transforms, so does the narrator's understanding of Agnes. The experience of sharing space with this woman old enough to be her mother, becoming more agitated by her presence, begins to feel claustrophobic, all-consuming. Agnes praises her for being a good listener: "It wasn't often, she went on, that we could present ourselves to others, like a self-portrait. More often, we made portraits of the people around us, guessing at their features from occasional glimpses." This foreshadows the disintegration of their relationship; soon Agnes will be chiding her for not being such a good conversationalist after all. Recounting stories of her failing marriage and past friendships, the woman upstairs evinces a habit of looking for mirror images of herself in other people — or for muses who gain little in the bargain. Before Agnes comes into her life, the narrator wrestles with the difficulty of understanding the medieval perception of the naked body. But during her year with Agnes she comes across a set of letters from a pilgrim that clarifies her argument: "The pilgrim's description of the nude sculptures was frank and sympathetic, without any squeamishness or avoidance of the subjects' sex, nor with any hint of judgement towards the fallen bodies." It's a topic, then, that wasn't — as others had argued — always taboo at the time. Books D.H. Lawrence hated women writers. Now they get to speak A new Lawrence biography, "Burning Man," by Frances Wilson, and Rachel Cusk's novel "Second Place" turn the toxic male author into rich material. Aug. 17, 2021 Just after making this hard-won discovery, the narrator is forced to learn a deeper truth about Agnes. The painter's personal life and history become a performance to which she has front-row tickets — as do we.