The women come & go, talking of mucky, chewed Legos

Arlington Park
By Rachel Cusk
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 248 pp., $23

The Arlington Park of Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is a prim-faced, highly desirable English suburb where it's far easier to find a fourth for bridge than a protest march or an honest conversation. The men disappear each morning into the all-powerful service economy that pays their mortgages, while the women prepare for the daily battle of motherhood -- knives between their teeth, ready to go mano a mano with saliva-encrusted Legos and headless Barbies. And oh yes, the children: They are everywhere, small and terrifying, mostly because they're as vital as air. If the women come and go in Arlington Park, the children -- demonic and as unstoppable as a head cold -- are the only irrefutable sign of progress, and thus of hope.

Not much to recommend the blissful notion of the nuclear family here, but then, as one adolescent girl puts it, "Marriage is just another word for hate." (That she has just finished discussing "Wuthering Heights" only underscores her point.) Because "Arlington Park" is hideously funny, I suppose you could call it a domestic comedy, in the way that a bad day at Wal-Mart or Kafka's "Metamorphosis" might be comic with the right ironic voiceover. It's a novel with a sense of rightness at its core and a narrative intelligence so swift and piercing it can take your breath away. But it also suffers the brunt of its own terrible humor. In depic ting the airless anomie of a particular microcosm of bourgeois provincialism, Cusk's story line finds itself trapped in an infinite corridor of its own construction.

Imagine, for the sake of comparison, "Mrs. Dalloway" without the higher meaning or "The Dead" without its tender, devastating reprieve. The events of "Arlington Park" take place over a single day, one that begins after a rain-savaged night and unfolds through the shifting perspectives of several Arlington Park women. The first (and the salvation of the novel) is Juliet Randall , a 36-year-old teacher at the tony girls' high school. Juliet could have been a contender -- "With her job, her Ph.D., her air of bitterness, she was an outsider" -- but she has wound up here with Benedict, her well-meaning liberal husband, and their two young children; along with imparting literature to her students, Juliet's goal is to shield her own daughter "from the bullet of an ordinary life." She endures dinner with her wealthy, reactionary neighbors, tries to love her husband in spite of his gentle, patriarchal oblivion, chops off all her hair with a finality tantamount to facing a firing squad. When her girls line up for literary club, she gives them the sorrows of "Madame Bovary" and "Anna Karenina," her beloved novels beckoning to her "like little lights in a wilderness, a moor." If only because of her love of literature's brutal truths, Juliet occupies the lonely moral center of the novel. It's a space she shares begrudgingly with Maisie, a recent transplant from London, who confesses to her husband, on their way to a horrid, sparkly dinner, that "if I don't get angry I'll die."

Which actually might be of some dramatic interest, come to think of it. 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. Their individual narratives intertwine and meet for dinner, or wander off alone into bearable misery. They go to the shopping mall and try on loud, unpleasant clothes. There's Solly, pregnant with her fourth child, trying to live out her misspent dreams through the foreign boarders she takes in. And careful Amanda, who has the most potentially compelling moment come her way when she faces, but only for a minute or two, her grandmother's death. The only chance at redemption in the novel involves a pair of swans (symbolically way beneath Cusk's originality); by this time in the story, as they soar above Juliet in downy devotion to each other, you want to cry out, " But swans are really mean!"

"It was a dangerous place to live in, a family," thinks Maisie, "the shifting allegiances, the flurries of cruelty and virtue, the great battering waves of mood and mortality, the endless alternation of storm and calm." That searing and smart description of our hallowed nuclear unit is typical of Cusk, who is surely one of the most crisply talented young writers in England. As she was in her previous novel, "In the Fold," here she is brilliant on class and gender, the little prisons we build for ourselves, subsisting on the gruel of possibility instead of the meatier stuff of courage. But "Arlington Park" should have taken the same leap it so desires for its characters. At the end of the novel, caught in an oppressive dinner conversation, Juliet's good-hearted husband quotes a bit of Philip Larkin's "Going, Going ," only half-ironically mourning the death of England: "And that will be England gone / The shadows, the meadows, the lanes." In "Arlington Park," Cusk has given us the lanes, certainly the shadows, and not a trace of Larkin's nostalgia.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.