The title refers to a rustic guest cabin on the same
property as the narrator’s main house.
The fiftyish narrator, known to us simply as M, offers the cabin to a
formerly renowned artist, known to us as L. L’s work had a life-changing effect
on M in her younger days, but his relevance to the art world has since
faded. He shows up with a beautiful
young woman named Brett, who turns out to be quite wealthy and adept at a
number of tasks. The narrator is stunned
and disappointed that L brought along a girlfriend, and we have to wonder what
exactly was M’s motivation in inviting him.
She is married to Tony, who is a salt-of-the-earth guy whose portrait L
wants to paint. M fumes that she is not
to be the subject of one of L’s paintings, but it soon becomes obvious that L
intensely dislikes M, especially as she humiliates herself trying to gain his
favor. I’m not sure who comes across
worse in this novel, L or M, as L behaves like an entitled brat, and M is
making a royal mess of her life, as she has apparently done in the past. M seems to be aware that L is a snobbish,
cruel boor but still yearns for his attention and approval, despite the fact
that her husband is a much better man. This
novel is small in terms of number of pages but weighty in content, I suppose,
and contains a lot of abstract philosophizing that I did not understand. Sometimes the sentences just did not make
sense to me and threatened to put me to sleep.
And what’s with all the annoying exclamation points? Wake-up calls, maybe? At times, I felt as though I were reading an
email written in all caps.
