No narrator is an island
Transit By Rachel Cusk HarperCollins 272 pp; $ 29.99 I met a woman, a theatre artist, who told me she could make people talk to her on the bus. I just sit there, she claimed, and, without saying a word, I can draw a stranger near and get them to tell me things. I believed this woman, who had essentially performed this same silent summoning on me in a different context, and, many years later, I still marvel.
Reading Rachel Cusk’s Transit, a companion piece, or perhaps a sequel, to her previous novel, Outline, I often wondered if its protagonist, a writer and educator named Faye, who in many ways seems to resemble Cusk herself, also possessed this skill. Or if it was, rather, a trick of narration, a matter of simply making it seem like Faye moves through the world like a sort of mesmerist, drawing others near, drawing their stories from them while offering very little of her own. It is, in any case, an ingenious device for a novel, or at least ingenious in the hands of a novelist with Cusk’s power to cast a hush over ordinary moments and render their contents as sculpted, illuminated things.
These are narratives about other people, told in the first- person, with the narrator’s responses most often elided. I am not the first to note how Faye’s encounters with others in Outline and Transit echo encounters in the novels of W.G. Sebald, though Cusk is less abashed about having her narrator state the effect of this mode of storytelling.
From Outline: “I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.”
From Transit: “… listening to the foreign hubbub of their conversation, I would become confused, forgetting where I was and what phase of life I was in.”
Faye’s phase of l i fe in Transit is, rather aptly, one of transition: in the wake of marital disintegration, she moves with her children from the provinces back to London to start life anew in middle age.
The novel’s title, however, is also not without irony: a key motif in Transit is houses and their varying capacities for providing stability, and if Transit has a central action it is Faye’s purchase of “a bad house on a good street,” a house in dire needs of renovations.
Two labourers come to perform these renovations, one Albanian, the other a Pole. In one of Transit’s many moments of low- key comedy, the Albanian dubs himself Destruction and the Pole Construction, and there seems to be much more of the former going on than the latter, to the degree that Faye is barely able to live in the house — which in its state of stripped- down disarray, its furniture cloaked in white sheets, feels skeletal, like an outline.
Meanwhile, in one of Transit’s threads of surprisingly high- key, even grotesque comedy, Faye must contend with a very different sort of comedic duo, a pair of cranky, mole- like, foulodour-producing neighbours living in her basement, who erupt into fits of broom-handle ceiling- thumping every time Faye or her children take a step, and who seem hell- bent on convincing the entire block that Faye, who comes across as a paragon of discretion, is a cruel witch and flamboyant slut. Those downstairs neighbours could be, as Faye says, characters out of Beckett, but they could also be out of an early Mike Leigh film, a burlesque on English miserablism that would seem out of place in Transit were it not for Cusk’s careful, deadpan framing of their appearances.
Elsewhere Faye converses with, among others, an ex- boyfriend who remains affected by their long- ago breakup; a hair salon proprietor struggling to balance an act of generosity with his penchant for complaint; an aspiring writer whose seemingly misguided identification with Marsden Hartley has her convinced that she must write about the longdeceased American painter’s life; and the organizer of a literary festival barely able to disguise his amorous intentions.
Each of these characters indeed offers some oblique commentary on what we might suppose to be Faye’s fears and desires. Outline ended with Faye meeting someone who functioned as a kind of twin; similarly, in Transit’s final chapter Faye meets someone who relays a childhood memory that resonates with Faye’s way of inhabiting the world. A Swedish woman tells Faye a story about surreptitiously tape- recording her family dinners as a little girl and listening back to them later, like a junior private investigator, so as to develop a deeper understanding of her parents’ relationship. “I like it that you ask these questions,” the Swede tells Faye at one point. “But I don’t understand why you want to know.”
For all Faye’s mysteries, her motivations for asking questions are, for we readers at least, not so obscure. What Cusk has presented us with, via Faye, are novels that are in a curious manner the equivalent of road movies: they send their heroine, who is always articulated just precisely enough to be more than a cypher, out into a world where every experience, every face, voice and gesture, every vividly conveyed personal story, is at once unique unto itself and an opportunity for self- reflection.
Which is another way of saying that Cusk, with this latest body of work, has reinvented herself as a gifted curator of encounters, creating a portrait of one through interactions with many.