The Lucky Ones, by Rachel Cusk

It is, perhaps, not surprising that a writer who has written controversially on motherhood should begin her new novel with a chapter entitled "confinement". It is also a suitably old-fashioned word for the transition from free agent to angst-ridden eternal-provider. Selected for the Granta Best of Young British Novelists promotion, Rachel Cusk is famous for a prose style that consists of long sentences studded with polysyllabic abstractions and ponderous sub-clauses. It has been described as "convoluted" and "teeth-clenched", but has also provoked comparisons with Henry James and Jane Austen.

The confinement in the first chapter is literal in many senses. Kirsty is in prison, victim of a miscarriage of justice, and in labour. Surrounded by women "stiff with unhappiness and boredom and with never being looked at", she receives no sympathy or support. Shortly after she gives birth, in a police car on the way to the hospital, we are whisked to the Swiss mountains, where a group of middle-class chums are on a skiing holiday.

Once again, babies feature prominently, this time by their absence. Christian and Lucy are consumed with longing for the twins they have left for the first time, while Martin spends the holiday in a state of confused anxiety about the recent arrival of a baby daughter.

It soon becomes clear that this is no action-packed drama, but a series of interlocking cameos, offering glimpses of individual, often tormented, states of mind.

Next we join Lucy's twin sister, musing on her childhood, her relationships and her childlessness. Then, most vividly, we meet Mrs Daley, who "liked to see her children tied down by their children; she had a sense of it all as a great tapestry being embroidered away into the future".

She has a guilt-ridden and punitive relationship with her daughter, Josephine, and is horrified when she turns up on her doorstep suffering from post-natal depression. It doesn't, however, stop her from holding her annual drinks party and inviting the local celeb, beautiful journalist Serena Porter, who churns out a popular column on the quirks of family life.

The links between the different stories are extremely slight. The main link is thematic: the sacrifices, compromises and confusions of love, its potential for redemption and disappointment. Above all, it is about the relationship between mothers and children, about voracious need and the ways in which need can breed resentment.

Cusk's approach is to go straight for the jugular. She barely brushes the surface before peeling away the layers to reveal what lies beneath. At times, it seems as though she is attempting to document every twitch, every nuance, every fleeting sensation. Every simile seems to grope towards greater precision, and at times they seem to flow in an endless stream. Sometimes, you feel trapped in a morass of detail that is, to use one of her own similes, spreading "like frantic ivy over every available surface". At other times, you want to gasp with the shock of recognition at a rarely articulated thought delivered with a visceral punch.

Rachel Cusk can be a victim of her own stylistic excesses. She has a tendency, in grappling with the abstract, to over-use certain words – "membrane", "penumbra", "stain" and "shadow" – and, in her painfully correct prose, to use "I" as the object, instead of "me".

Her tendency to over-state can also push her characters towards caricature. In her perception and precision, however, Cusk remains a very good writer indeed.