Outline, Transit, and Kudus are captivating novels if you like writing that brilliantly intertwines descriptions of everyday experience and arresting insights into, perhaps, your own reality that you’ve never articulated . . . and if you don’t depend on much of a plot to keep you reading. I love this kind of writing. I also like films where not much happens but where feelings and thoughts are forefront. The loose plot is that of a writer traveling to destinations is Europe to promote her books and to teach a summer class. In the latter books she returns to London and we get glimpses into home life.

Cusk does slowly build a main character. Yet she is more of a center around which revolve a series of short stories. The other characters she encounters disclose anecdotes. These brief narratives open whole worlds. They may be mundane on the surface, but often provide insight into family dynamics, emotional psychology, life trajectories, what is meaningful to people, what is baffling. The stories blend together beautifully as Cusk’s prose seamlessly moves from one to the other.

The protagonist usually does not explicitly judge the other characters. Readers are left to judge for themselves. This raises questions about whether we should judge others and by what standard. Cusk’s sophisticated account of being can make it difficult to begin reading other books. I already miss the way her account of daily life makes me feel simultaneously grounded in the present and ready for the whole world to rush in.

Outline by Rachel Cusk (2014)

Outline begins with a conversation on a flight to Greece. The character is adrift, not tethered to home, and her identity unknown to us. Greece is often associated with vacations, so the setting is immediately freeing. This novel incorporates many thoughts we might have about the wide world and ourselves when traveling alone. It touches on the theme of escape. The thin plot and minimal character development speak to experiences like travel when we encounter new and vast stimuli; things happen to us. Our own agency is in the background of experience. I get chills thinking about the many possible interpretations of this style of writing.

Favorite quotes:

“The plane began to move, trundling forward so that the vista appeared to unfreeze into motion, flowing past the windows first slowly and then faster, until there was the feeling of effortful, half-hesitant lifting as it detached itself from the earth. There was a moment in which it seemed impossible that this could happen. But then it did.”

 “Money is a country all its own.”

“The water was so clear and still and cool, the shapes of the coastline so soft and ancient, with the little island nearby that seemed to belong to nobody. I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean; a desire for freedom, and impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summon from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as I liked, if what I wanted was to drown. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.”

Transit by Rachel Cusk (2016)

We learn more about our protagonist in this installment as she describes her daily life as she remodels a London flat. This return to London and environs feels more familiar, less open and uncertain as we are given insight into our character’s quotidian life. There are more appearances by friends and family. By the end we understand that the novel tells a story of a time of transition. This middle novel is bookended by experiences abroad, yet here we are led to think about times of internal transitions.

Favorite quotes:

“By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross.”

“I remembered then Gerard’s unreasonableness and childishness in the old days, his volatility and occasional exhibitionism. I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same ay that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities. I was well aware, I said, that Gerard had constituted one such reality at the time those events had occurred. His feelings had to be ridden roughshod over; the story couldn’t be constructed otherwise. Yet now, I said, when I thought about that time, these discarded elements – everything that had been denied or willfully forgotten in the service of that narrative – were what increasingly predominated. Like the objects I had left in his flat, these discarded things had changed their meaning over the years, and not always in a way that’s easy to accept. My own indifference to Gerard’s suffering, for example, which at the time I had barely considered, had come to seem increasingly criminal to me.”

“I imagined her in the dusk of a Paris garden, untouched in her white dress, an object thirsting if not for interpretation then for the fulfillment at least of an admiring human gaze, like a painting hanging on a wall, waiting.”

“The problem was, the more complex he allowed his vision of life to become, the further he removed himself from his own capacity to act. He was left tortured by the possibility he himself had so painfully evolved, of translating himself wholly into the middleclass world of which, until now, he had been the factotum.”

“She had never found it hard to get men, she went on, or not very nice ones at least, but at a certain point it became clear to her that men like Dan were not to be found just wandering around the place. They were taken, owned, spoken for; in a way she despised it, their life of possession; they were like expensive paintings hung in the safety of a museum. You could look as hard as you liked, but you weren’t going to find one just lying in the street. For a while she did look, and felt as if she was inhabiting some netherworld populated by lost soul, all of the searching, searching for some image that corresponded with what was in their heads. Sleeping with a man she would very often have this feeling, that she was merely the animus for a pre-existing framework, that she was invisible hand that everything he did and said to her he was in fact doing and saying to someone else, someone who wasn’t there, someone who may or may not even have existed. This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person’s solitude –  kind of ghost – nearly drove her mad for a while.”

“I had been thinking lately about evil…and was beginning to realize that it was not a product of will but of its opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire. It was, in a way, a state of passion.”

“That idea – of one’s own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realized that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy.”

“He had come to the conclusion, he went on, that up to a certain point his whole life had been driven by needing things rather than liking them, and that once he had started interrogating it on that basis, the whole thing had faltered and collapsed.”

Kudus by Rachel Cusk (2018)

Once again, our writer – whose name we find out is Faye – is en route to a European destination. It takes some time to figure out where it is. Once there, she mingles with professionals in the literary world. There are many passages that you may or may not agree with but that, hopefully, make you think. It interesting

that the reader experiences what Faye does, but usually without the experience of her judgement. Again, you are left to make your own judgements. This includes the meaning of the ending and the title too. The trilogy moves forward but does not wrap up neat bow.

Favorite quotes:

“I noticed that everyone there was around the same age as the married couple, and the absence of anyone older or younger made it seem as though these events were bound neither to the future nor the past, and that no one was entirely certain whether it was freedom or irresponsibility that had untethered them.”

“despite our nostalgia for the past and for history, we would quickly find ourselves unable to live there for reasons of discomfort, since the defining motivation of the modern era, he said, whether consciously or not, is the pursuit of freedom from strictures of hardships of any kind.”

“Yet in heart she believed that without history there was no identity, and so she couldn’t ultimately understand her children’s lack of interest in their past, nor their devotion to the cult of happiness. Theirs is a world without war, she said, but it is also a world without memory. They forgive so easily it is almost as if nothing matters. They are kind to their own children, she said, kinder than our generation ever was, yet their lives seem to me to be without beauty. She paused slowly and blinked her eyes.”

“Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honor, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.”

“Her children were very small, she said, but she had got into the habit of asking each of the writers she met to sign a copy of their book with a dedication for them. She put the books on a special shelf at home, because although the children were too young to read them now, she liked the idea of them finding a shelf with all these books dedicated to them in the future.”

“This family was big and noisy and easy-going, and there was always room for him at the table, where huge comforting meals were served and where everything was discussed but nothing examined, so that there was no danger of passing through the mirror, as he had put it, into the state of painful self-awareness where human fictions lose their credibility.”

“These trees took an extraordinary long time to grow, he said, and the towering specimens in the city were decades – indeed centuries – old. People sometimes tried to grow them in their own gardens, but unless you were fortunate enough to have inherited one, it was almost impossible to reproduce this spectacle on your own private property. He had many friends – smart, aspirational people of good taste – who had planted a jacaranda tree in their new garden as though this law of nature somehow didn’t apply to them and they could make it grown by force of their will. After a year or two they would become frustrated and complain that it had barely increased even an inch. But it would take twenty, thirty, forty years for one of these trees to grow and yield its beautiful display, he said smiling: when you tell them this fact they are horrified, perhaps because they can’t imagine remaining in the same house or indeed the same marriage for so long, and they almost come to hate their jacaranda tree, he said, sometimes even digging it up and replacing it with something else, because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said, that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves.”

HAPPY READING!