Review by Will Preston
There’s a moment towards the end of Kudos, the final installment of Rachel Cusk’s groundbreaking Outline trilogy, when the whole work—hundreds of pages of characters and conversation—abruptly and elegantly folds in on itself, smaller and smaller until, like a magic trick, it fits inside a single, luminous image. On her way to dinner in an unnamed European country, our narrator, Faye, is pulled off on a detour by her companion. Their destination is an old church that was completely ravaged by fire some fifty years earlier: the paintings and statues destroyed, the stonework “split into two by the heat.” Instead of restoring the church, Faye’s companion explains, the damaged interior was left untouched and reopened for worship. On her first visit, she had found the blackened interior so distressing she had wanted to scream. But then she realized the scorched walls were covered with something like images, ghostly shapes and textures left by the flames:
“I noticed that in certain places where statues had obviously been, new lights had been installed which illuminated the empty spaces. These lights had the strange effect of making you see more in the empty space than you would have seen had it been filled with a statue. And so I knew that this spectacle was not the result of some monstrous neglect or misunderstanding but was the work of an artist.” (212-213)
The same can easily be said for Cusk’s trilogy, a high-wire feat of literary virtuosity all the more remarkable for its unwavering restraint and quiet precision. The premise of the trilogy—which began with Outline in 2014 and continued with last year’s Transit—is at once stupefyingly simple and wickedly hard to describe. In Athens, London, and elsewhere in Europe, a writer named Faye has a series of encounters with friends, strangers, and acquaintances. One after the other, these characters open up about their lives with epic, unfurling monologues: some with brutal honesty, others with painful self-delusion. And yet, in a move that turns first-person narration on its head, Faye herself remains almost completely passive during these interactions: a mere window for these stories to pass through. Even in the face of the most shocking revelations (and actions, in one case), our ostensible protagonist remains silent, inscrutable: an empty space where a statue would normally be.
This, to put it mildly, should not work. There is something thrillingly transgressive about taking the most intimate of narrative forms and stripping it of everything that gives it its power: access to a character’s innermost thoughts and memories and desires. Yet the excision of a narrator, whose arc naturally shapes our understanding of a story’s events, has the effect of drawing us deeper into the books—as if we, rather than Faye, are the recipients of these monologues. The lack of an overarching conflict or master plot has led some to label the Outline trilogy as non-narrative. But to do so obscures the fact that Kudos, like its predecessors, is practically overflowing with narrative. Its characters are inveterate storytellers, their tales rich with insight and poetic flashes of detail. A Knausgaard-esque novelist tortured by the effect of his divorce on his teenage son; a translator caught in a psychologically abusive relationship; Faye’s seatmate on an airplane, “so tall he couldn’t fit in his seat,” whose bond with his dog is stronger than that with his family. (1)
Individually, these stories explore themes like parenthood, morality, power, feminism, and the fraught relationship between these subjects and art. But Kudos’ true focus is the fracturing of the self: the divide between public and private personas, the space between what we say and how we act. How can we truly know ourselves, what we truly believe, when we’ve divided our identities into such disparate parts, with the gulf between growing ever wider? Cusk, sagely, has intuited that this question has only become more relevant since the trilogy began in 2014. Where Outline and Transit transpired out of time, Kudos unfolds in an explicitly post-Brexit landscape, where matters of identity have acquired a new urgency:
“The question of whether to leave or remain was one we usually asked ourselves in private, to the extent that it could almost be said to constitute the innermost core of self-determination. If you were unfamiliar with the political situation in our country, you might think you were witnessing not the machinations of democracy but the final surrender of personal consciousness into the public domain.” (11-12)
Cusk’s characters have always been impossibly articulate. But here in the home stretch they are doubly so, their stories openly preoccupied with issues of the self: its creation, its deterioration, and—especially in the novel’s stunning second half—its erasure. Such themes naturally lead back to the very premise of the book, and Kudos is perfectly willing to ask itself the same hard questions as its characters. Take the man who wonders if “there can be a third kind of morality, beyond that of the person who leaves and the person who stays…[an honesty] that can describe evil as dispassionately as virtue without erring on the side of one or the other.” (183) Like the burned-out church, this certainly sounds like a summation of Cusk’s entire project, of Faye’s invisible, lens-like quality. Can a work of art depict the range of human experience, from good to evil, dispassionately and without judgment? And does doing so prove a kind of moral incorruptibility, or is it merely disingenuous? Whatever the case, Cusk certainly isn’t foolish enough to supply us with an answer.
This is dense, philosophical stuff, and it is to Cusk’s tremendous credit that it never feels so. Indeed, while the Outline trilogy has been justly praised for its intelligence and daring, the true joy of these books lies in Cusk’s ability to craft a perfect sentence—to draw us so completely into a scene that the boundary between reader and page seems to dissolve. Take this passage, a hypnotic description of a small European town:
“Through the windows you could hear the sounds of footsteps on the cobbles below and the hiss and whirr of bicycles passing in their shoals and drifts; and most of all you could hear the bells that rang unendingly from the town’s many churches, striking not just the hours but the quarter and half hours, so that each segment of time became a seed of silence that then blossomed, filling the air with what almost seemed a kind of self-description.” (62)
I remember precisely where I was when I read this passage. I was sitting on a bench in the park near my apartment, at golden hour, the evergreens tall and silent around me. There was a playground in front of me, and there was a woman on one of the swings, her long brown hair billowing out behind her as she propelled herself higher and higher. Behind me, on the street, a beat-up van with engine trouble was attempting to parallel park, and although it had successfully maneuvered into the spot, it was now performing a strange dance of slowly backing up until it was almost touching the car behind it, then inching forward until it was just a hair from the car in front, then straight back again, then forward, its engine straining with each gear change.
This is the great gift of the Outline trilogy: Cusk’s prose, her characters’ exact attention to the world, awakens something in us. I ended the book as if tuned to a different wavelength. Where before there had been a familiar grid of concrete and asphalt, I now saw a city constructed by possibility and mystery. In place of empty space, I saw a thousand hidden narratives, waiting to be discovered. I wondered about the people I passed on the street. I wondered what private struggles consumed them, what stories they might tell if I asked them, what strange and wondrous things they had noticed on their way.
Will Preston’s writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous publications, including The Common, The Smart Set, Smithsonian Folkways, The Masters Review, and Maisonneuve. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Visit him at willprestonwriter.wordpress.com.