Kudos by Rachel Cusk – a daringly truthful trilogy concludes
Faye, the artful listening presence in Outline and Transit, is back – but this time there’s a self-consciousness to the narrative voice
Kate Clanchy
Friday 4 May 2018
I
In her novels, Cusk had never been comfortable with complex, long-form plots, but at the same time was doggedly intellectual, intent on foregrounding ideas: earlier the strain, in the queasy satire of Arlington Park and essay-like stasis of The Bradshaw Variations, had been showing. Now she dispensed with all of that: Faye apparently imposed nothing on the world; she listened to others talking and presented their monologues linked only by the power of imagery and voice. Cusk had only ever had one, highly wrought, arch style, which could easily seem mannered (“assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface” she once wrote, of pizza), and had never produced easy, natural dialogue: now, as Faye reported page after page of speech in that same rapid, surmising style we not only heard the conversations but received a powerful sense of feelings muted and talked over.
In her memoirs, Cusk had puzzled away at the problems of existence in a way that sometimes seemed haughty, as when in 2009’s The Last Supper she attributed her restlessness as a young mother in Bristol to her sensitivity to the legacy of the slave trade. She struggled with self-disclosure, veering between over-frank revelations that got The Last Supper sued and coy, high-minded lacunae. In contrast, Faye spoke rarely but directly about herself and even told stories about pets and children. Cusk’s fine feminist anger had always contended with alienating, visceral spasms of horror at other women – “witches” with “grey” teeth, older mothers with “fat, freckled arms”: but Faye sat with and talked with as many women as men. Cusk had never, even in her memoir of birth, owned up to an awkward female body of her own; Faye had no reflection, either, but seemed merely unselfconscious. Cusk was always armoured, barbed, rebarbative: Faye let us see what a brave, gleamingly truthful writer she could be.
Transit, published in 2016, was even better. It continued Faye’s artful/artless listening but took on Cusk’s intellectual and feminist concerns too, delivering memorable accounts of a literary festival where Faye is talked over by male writers and groped by the chairman, yet retains a cool, forlorn integrity; and of a funny, sad, posh dinner party where Faye observes the febrile modern family. In Transit she also falls, reluctantly, in love. This was thrilling because Cusk allows us so near to Faye; because we feel we almost are her, seeing from her dark centre.
It’s addictive, sharing such a strange, bright vision of the world; and Kudos, this final part of the Faye trilogy, has been eagerly awaited. Contentedly, we snuggle in beside Faye, off in a plane to a book event, as in the beginning of Outline; a little anxiously we observe the man sitting next to us. Is he going to oblige us with a searing monologue about his dying marriage, as everyone did in Outline, or perhaps a living pet, like those fabulous salukis in Transit? Or has everyone here heard of Faye now, just as, surely, no one bookish in our world would ever confide in Cusk while travelling? We exhale as we realise the seatmate is garrulous, unliterary, unhappy and, hurrah, has a (large, shaggy) dog story. It’s a good story, but still, something is different, and it is to do with Faye.
She’s talking back. Talking back at length, too, the way she so rarely did in the other books. “The question of whether to leave or remain was one we usually asked of ourselves in private, to the extent that it could constitute the innermost core of self-determination,” she pronounces, apparently out loud. “If you were unfamiliar with the political situation in our country, you might think you were witnessing not the machinations of a democracy but the final surrender of personal consciousness into the public domain,” she continues, recasting the man’s sweet story about taking “Leave” and “Remain” signs personally into something elaborate in a high register. This does not sound like Faye. This sounds like Cusk, authoritatively introducing us to the themes of her novel: leaving and remaining.
These themes recur, in connection with families and marriages as well as with Britain and Europe. So does the Rachel Cusk voice. Outline opened with an account of Faye taking lunch with a billionaire who is playing with the idea of starting a literary magazine. Faye said, powerfully, nothing. Now, she has no sooner landed than she sets about a German publisher with similar commercial notions: “Whether or not he believed that Dante could look after himself it seemed to me he ought to defend him at every opportunity.” Minutes later she is picking on a “tall, soft, thick-limbed woman” for her “matted-looking hanks” of hair. Soon, an older woman will be “reptilian”.
Cusk-style problems of disclosure manifest themselves too. Outline took us to Athens and we explored the sights with Faye and her neighbour from the plane, invisible as any tourist; Transit trailed us round London, often in the company of migrant builders. Kudos takes us to two European cities, into closed-off spaces with writers and journalists who are also à clef. Almost all Faye’s conversations are with people who are also interested in writing down stories, or indeed are in the act of writing Faye down for an interview, and there is a self-consciousness to all this, a riddling, hall-of-mirrors element that is the reverse of the radical humility of the first two books.
And it creates, simply, distance. Faye keeps secrets from us now: where she is, what has happened in the – seemingly considerable – time that has passed since the last book, where she lives, what has become of her house renovations and the terrible neighbours. Once, we felt her lover’s hand “moulding” her arm, felt her loneliness in the pits of our stomachs; now she lets us hear from a journalist that she has married again, and from her reply to another that her son has left to live with his father; and she won’t elaborate. It feels like a betrayal, or a snub.
In each novel of the trilogy, Faye is named once. In Outline it is in passing by a mortgage adviser and is a moment of crushing loneliness; in Transit it is piercingly, by her lover; in Kudos, it is by her son in a phone conversation. It is a strong idea – the child not naming his mother as such – but it comes in the middle of a conversation where the boy calls his father Dad, and where he is lovingly confiding in Faye and treating her emphatically as a mother; it doesn’t ring quite true. Then Faye ends the novel by going for a swim off a nude beach and having a staring match with a man pissing in the sea. “The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature, while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes and I waited for him to stop.” Again, there is something a little stagey about the moment, a little summative and forced, and besides, she’s mixed her metaphors.
Or perhaps it just seems so because Cusk has set the bar so high. There are many remarkable moments in Kudos; it is a fine novel that deserves to receive – and probably will, given the limping nature of literary kudos – a heap of awards in recognition of the vast achievement of the trilogy. Nevertheless, I was sorry it ended here, and not with the peerless moment in Transit where Faye, leaving that terrible dinner party, feels “change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surfaces of things, like the plates of the earth blindly moving in their black traces”.
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