A triumphant finish
Cusk’s award-winning trilogy ends with quiet heroine Faye emerging from the shadows
Kudos, the final instalment of Rachel Cusk’s brilliant, transfixing trilogy (whose first two novels, Outline and
Transit, were both nominated for the Giller Prize) takes place in a sweltering, unnamed European city where our minimalist heroine, Faye, has gone to attend a literary festival against the uncertain backdrop of Brexit.
If you’ve read the previous novels — which you should — then you already know the drill: Faye has a series of encounters with people who, dispensing with small talk, and even standard greetings, launch into unprompted monologues on various topics as Faye, for the most part, listens silently. This time, the latter are all cogs in the literary machine — journalists, translators, fellow writers, editors — their subjects of choice marriage, children, suffering and the meaning of freedom and success.
Of Faye’s own life, we have only the skeletal knowledge that she’s a divorced writer with two sons living in London.
Outline and Transit were written in the shadow of that personal upheaval.
Here, we learn she has remarried and that her older son is finishing high school.
Why this approach, even on its third round, is never dull, contrived or pretentious has something to do with the characters and their soliloquys and a lot to do with Cusk’s thrilling intelligence and lightness of touch.
Her work has been described as darkly serious, and it can be, but she’s also deviously funny.
Take the interviewer who uses her entire time with Faye analyzing her own relationship with her sister and who, as she brings the “interview” to an abrupt end, reassures Faye that she already got everything she needs for the “long, important piece” she’s going to write from the internet.
And then there’s Faye’s cynical young publisher, who takes only a superficial interest in his authors’ work but boasts of having brought his hallowed literary house into profitability through Sudoku sales.
Cusk’s world remains quietly atmospheric with a hint of the unreal.
There’s a Borgesian quality to the story told to Faye by a young, clearly autistic guide, about how the city built an underground concert hall then discovered overhead traffic caused the acoustics to function in reverse. (In one of several curious mirrorings, an Irish writer later tells Faye about his son’s recent autism diagnosis.)
Outline was so called because Faye was barely present.
And while she remains a placid, sponge-like presence in Kudos, there are distinct signs of a Cuskian emergence. On several occasions she interrupts her companions’ speechifying with her own thoughts and opinions.
A triumphant finish to an ambitious, unconventional trilogy cements Cusk’s position as one of today’s most original fiction writers.
The charged delicacy of these books is underpinned by what is sure to be their durability as literature.