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Rachel Cusks new novel,Kudos,completes the trilogy she began in 2014 withOutlineand extended in 2016 withTransit.
The cycle constitutes an artistic breakthrough and a triumph within this decades international turn to autofiction.
Cusk has learned that to listen is also to ingratiate.
But thats also why its hard to think ofKudosand its predecessors as works of realism.
Does she possess coercive psychic powers?
Has everyone in these books except Faye ingested some disinhibiting substance?
Why cant we all live in such a world of frankness and emotional sophistication, if not exactly clarity?
Self-delusion, of course, persists.
Faye is a reliable narrator, which can only be said to varying degrees of her interlocutors.
The consistent degree of remove is a zone of judgment for the reader and the narrator.
Fayes withheld skepticism becomes a source of these novels considerable fun.
The evenness of Cusks cool, detached style is a wonder.
The prose of the Outline Trilogy is like a wide and placid lake.
The reader is like a water-skier gliding along exhilarated by the combination of verbal tranquility and emotional intensity.
Similar effects attend any disruption in tone.
These characters commit comic malapropisms and speak in a not-quite-unbroken English.
These writers prize voice over style.
Voice and style can they be separated?
A writer may not be able to escape her style, but a style can accommodate multiple voices.
These writers are all stylists and the tension between style and voice is why weve flocked to them.
In aggregate, they come to seem just that: variations.
After he kills a fawn, the man beats him to discipline him.
The brutality of this story is an allegory for the savagery of family relationships in general.
The mans fingernails are the last we see of him.
hes gone, not to be heard of again.
Who could love a literary festival?
Theyre neither satisfyingly literary nor satisfyingly festive.
Attendees gaze on the fleshy spectres of solitary people doing the opposite of what they do best.
Writers deliver their stump speeches at a register somewhere between public therapy, stand-up comedy, and infomercial.
Organizers can take pride in a series of events executed without injury, scandal, or rain delay.
Journalists arrive to interview authors full of their own facile theories.
Of the Outline Trilogy,Kudospours the most acid on the literary world and thats why its my favorite.
Readers more interested in real estate and food will preferTransit.
That goes for literature too.
What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others.
I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.
Indeed, these books make no effort to persuade.
They simply conjure beauty out of the least likely materials.
The memoir of divorce Cusk published beforeOutlinewas calledAftermath.
These books have an afterglow.
