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| The dissolution of Cusk’s marriage, and the system it represented, impelled a new sort of writing from the author. Photograph by Laura Pannack for The New Yorker |
Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel
After her controversial memoirs of motherhood and marriage, the writer has a new design for fiction.
Judith Thurman
July 3, 2017
In Rachel Cusk’s most recent novels, “Outline” and “Transit,” a British writer named Faye encounters a series of friends and strangers as she goes about her daily life. She is recently divorced, and while her new flat is being renovated her two sons are living with their father. There is something catlike about Faye—an elusiveness that makes people want to detain her, and a curiosity about their pungent secrets. They tell her their histories, and she listens intently. As these soliloquies unspool, a common thread emerges. The speakers suffer from feeling unseen, and in the absence of a reflection they are not real to themselves. Faye shares their dilemma. “It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions,” she says. But she lends herself as a filter to her confidants, and from the murk of their griefs and sorrows, most of which have to do with love, she extracts something clear—a sense of both her own outline and theirs.
Critics have hailed these books, which are the first volumes of a trilogy, as a “reinvention” of the novel, and they are certainly a point of departure for it, one at which fiction merges with oral history. Each witness has suffered and survived a version of the same experience, but uniquely, and the events that are retold don’t build toward a revelation. The structure of the text, a mosaic of fragments, mirrors the unstable nature of memory. It is worth noting that “Outline” was published in 2014, a year before Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature. (“Transit” was published two years later.) Alexievich interviews women and men who have lived through cataclysms—the Second World War, Chernobyl, the Soviet gulags—and she distills their testimony into what the Swedish Academy cited as a “history of emotions.” Cusk has been chastised for ignoring politics and social inequities, and the central catastrophe in her fiction is family life. But her imaginary oral histories are exquisitely attuned to the ways in which humans victimize one another.
Late in “Transit,” Faye listens to a palaver about clothes and sex by a friend named Amanda, who works in fashion and has “a youthful appearance on which the patina of age was clumsily applied.” “No one ever tells you the truth about what you look like,” Amanda says of her profession, to which Faye responds, “Perhaps none of us could ever know what was true and what wasn’t.” At the end of their conversation, which is mostly about Amanda’s affair with her contractor, she stands up to leave the café, “darting frequent glances at me,” Faye observes. “It was as if she was trying to intercept my vision of her before I could read anything into what I saw.”
When I met Cusk, last winter, at a hotel in New York, I imagined that she might be similarly deflective, but she wasn’t. “You’ve caught me in a pliant conversational state,” she said, tucking her long legs under her. Cusk is tall and elegant, with the features of a ballerina: an expressive mouth and eyes in a finely molded small face. Frankness on intimate subjects seems to be a credo of both her life and her work. She had just finished a multicity book tour, and she was flying home to London the next day, eager to see her two teen-age daughters, Albertine and Jessye, and to resume work on “Kudos,” the last volume of her trilogy. “I’ll celebrate my fiftieth birthday in the air,” she noted. When I asked what the milestone meant to her, she paraphrased D. H. Lawrence: “Some people have a lot farther to go from where they begin to get where they want to be—a long way up the mountain, and that is how it has been for me. I don’t feel I am getting older; I feel I am getting closer.”
One way to measure the gifts of a writer, particularly a prolific one like Cusk, who has published twelve books in twenty-four years, is by the distance between her early work and that of her maturity. Cusk made her début in 1993, at the age of twenty-six, with “Saving Agnes,” a down-from-Oxford bildungsroman about a grandiose, tormented girl finding her way in London, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her subsequent novels include “The Country Life,” a parody of a gothic romance between a bratty invalid and his au pair, written in the ornate syntax of a Victorian moralizer; “In the Fold,” set in a bohemian manor house rife with sexual and dynastic intrigue; and “Arlington Park,” interlocking stories of suburban anomie. The chaste prose of her current trilogy seems almost like a reproach to the self-conscious virtuosity that preceded it. Before she wrote “Outline,” Cusk was a wickedly clever stylist, who fired off aphorisms like a French court diarist and made up the sort of metaphors—“cauliflower-haired old ladies”; the “floury haze” of a dry summer—that you flag in the margin. A woman’s gray teeth are “a bouquet of tombstones.” But Cusk sometimes bared her own teeth: her power to dazzle and to condemn.
Cusk judges several of her early books harshly: they were, she said, “bedevilled by a lack of benevolence.” By the time she published “The Bradshaw Variations,” in her early forties, that devil was behind her. Like its predecessors, but more humanely, the novel tells a conventional story of family rivalries and marital ennui (particularly wifely ennui). In retrospect, however, it was the end of a line. The Bradshaws’ real malaise, which wasn’t clear to Cusk yet, is the tyranny of conventional stories: the fates and the characters that we inherit, and to which we surrender our desires, along with our lives in the moment. Cusk was about to upend the plot of her own life—to break up her family, then to lose her house and her bearings. The ensuing turmoil would force her to question an old core principle of the writer’s vocation, to presume authority, and of woman’s vocation, to sacrifice herself for others.
As it happened, Cusk didn’t celebrate her birthday on the plane. She and her third husband, Siemon Scamell-Katz, who had travelled to America with her, were grounded in the Ramada at the Newark airport. Cusk was “looking from the window at a Hopper-esque landscape of freight trains and telegraph poles and feeling an entirely unfounded sense of optimism!” she e-mailed me gaily.
Cusk has felt more stranded in less alien environments: Los Angeles, where she spent the early part of a childhood she described as purgatorial; the “mediocre” Catholic boarding school where she was bullied and ostracized; provincial society in Brighton and Bristol, where she lived with her second husband when their daughters were young, struggling to reconcile the demands of motherhood with those of art and autonomy—the subject of her memoir “A Life’s Work”; and that marriage itself, which ended in a draught of bitterness that she purged like a poison in her memoir “Aftermath.”
Cusk’s former husband Adrian Clarke, who is nameless in “Aftermath” and virtually dematerialized—he haunts the text like a ghost—was a prominent civil-rights lawyer who quit his job when they left London, in 1999, shortly after the birth of their first daughter. He was a legal scholar at Oxford University for a while, and took up photography. They agreed that he would assume the primary burden of childcare while she worked on her books. “My notion was that we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female,” she writes. Many modern couples negotiate such an arrangement, but for Cusk it was more than a pragmatic bargain, or even a matter of justice—she staked her identity on it. “The child goes through the full-time mother like a dye through water,” she writes. “To act as a mother, I had to suspend my own character.”
In the thirteen years that she lived with Clarke, Cusk published seven books, including “The Last Supper,” a memoir of the family’s three-month sojourn in Italy which deserves a place in the canon of irritably highbrow British travelogues. “Consider the pizza,” she writes. “It is like a smiling face: it assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface.” On an ill-timed visit to Assisi—it is an overcast Sunday, and the city is teeming with tourists—the family has a long wait for a space in one of the parking lots. The hordes have come to see not the sublime early frescoes of Giotto but the dry bones of St. Francis, which reside in his basilica. “The mania for the tangible is the predictable consequence of the intangibility of religious belief,” she writes.
The most deeply felt passages in “The Last Supper” are reserved for the artists of the Renaissance; the most unforgiving, for any group, pastime, or individual that Cusk perceives as philistine. As in the case of the poor pizza, a lack of depth, or of an appetite for the dark and the visceral, never fails to disappoint her. But Cusk saves her fiercest scorn for the English middle class, and that animus has caused trouble for her, not only with critics who consider her an unreconstructed élitist. One of the British expats whom she encounters in “The Last Supper” disputed Cusk’s depiction of him, and sued her when the memoir appeared. Her publisher settled the suit without fighting it, then recalled and pulped the first edition. A revised text has been reprinted several times.
Clarke figures as an obliging fellow-traveller in “The Last Supper.” His presence is subsumed in the marital “we.” So, it would seem, was Cusk’s sense of entitlement to a stand-alone “I.” “Aftermath” is evasive about the reasons that the marriage ended. This was partly for the children’s sake, Cusk told me. In the book, however, she alludes to an “important vow of obedience” that was broken, and to her resentment of the fact that “I did both things, was both man and woman, while my husband—meaning well—only did one.” Clarke, she writes, “believed that I had treated him monstrously,” perhaps because he discovered that he had surrendered his male prerogatives to a feminist ideal only for his wife to regard him as desexed. A passage in “Arlington Park” may shed some light on Cusk’s view of this transaction. A woman who has uprooted her family from London and moved to the suburbs deeply regrets it. She and her husband are like deportees “with no access to the things that brought them together.” He, like Clarke, was a prominent lawyer, but he takes a job at a sleepy local firm, and only at her urging: “He wouldn’t have moved an inch if she hadn’t borne him along with her,” though she fears that in bearing him along she “had damaged him, so that she could no longer love him.”
At seven o’clock on a Sunday evening, ten weeks after Cusk’s birthday, we listened to the French-election news at the Red Lion, a pub in the village of Stiffkey, on the Norfolk coast. The weather was golden, and Cusk had gone for a long walk by herself on a path that runs through the salt marshes. When she arrived at the pub, wearing a pair of overalls, Scamell-Katz was waiting with a chilled bottle of Chablis. A few local friends—a fishmonger, a livery driver, a landscaper, a set builder—joined us with their pints. The talk, at first, was of electoral upsets on both sides of the Atlantic. Norfolk voted for Brexit, despite the fact that its farmers depend on immigrant labor. It wasn’t clear what the consensus of our group was, and Cusk tactfully turned the subject to children and roses. She calls herself “antisocial,” though the adjective didn’t jibe with her warmth and animation in that company. Having recently quit smoking, she vaped discreetly, drank with relish, and joked about her gardening skills. The only time that I saw a flash of aloofness was when the subject of nicknames arose. (The fishmonger’s was Fishy.) It bothered her, she admitted, when people shortened “Albertine” to something cuter, like Bean or Bibi. “It’s a noble name,” she said. “ ‘Noble’ is its literal meaning.”
Cusk and Scamell-Katz divide their time between Norfolk and London, where she owns a flat and her daughters go to school. “We spend most of our life in the car,” she said, “though at least we get to talk all the way.” They have been a couple for four years, and married for three. Their romance began one Christmas, when they were both without their children, and Scamell-Katz took Cusk to a wild Scottish peninsula, in the middle of a storm. I had the impression that their complicity still surprises them daily.
At seven o’clock on a Sunday evening, ten weeks after Cusk’s birthday, we listened to the French-election news at the Red Lion, a pub in the village of Stiffkey, on the Norfolk coast. The weather was golden, and Cusk had gone for a long walk by herself on a path that runs through the salt marshes. When she arrived at the pub, wearing a pair of overalls, Scamell-Katz was waiting with a chilled bottle of Chablis. A few local friends—a fishmonger, a livery driver, a landscaper, a set builder—joined us with their pints. The talk, at first, was of electoral upsets on both sides of the Atlantic. Norfolk voted for Brexit, despite the fact that its farmers depend on immigrant labor. It wasn’t clear what the consensus of our group was, and Cusk tactfully turned the subject to children and roses. She calls herself “antisocial,” though the adjective didn’t jibe with her warmth and animation in that company. Having recently quit smoking, she vaped discreetly, drank with relish, and joked about her gardening skills. The only time that I saw a flash of aloofness was when the subject of nicknames arose. (The fishmonger’s was Fishy.) It bothered her, she admitted, when people shortened “Albertine” to something cuter, like Bean or Bibi. “It’s a noble name,” she said. “ ‘Noble’ is its literal meaning.”
Cusk and Scamell-Katz divide their time between Norfolk and London, where she owns a flat and her daughters go to school. “We spend most of our life in the car,” she said, “though at least we get to talk all the way.” They have been a couple for four years, and married for three. Their romance began one Christmas, when they were both without their children, and Scamell-Katz took Cusk to a wild Scottish peninsula, in the middle of a storm. I had the impression that their complicity still surprises them daily.
Sunday nights at the Red Lion are a ritual of the couple’s country life, though they are otherwise homebodies. “You lose your power by living the wrong way,” Cusk said. She isolates herself to write, then works “around the clock”; Scamell-Katz, who is semiretired, protects her from intrusion, reading her manuscripts and vetting her reviews. The actual composition of a book, as opposed to the long period in which Cusk thinks about it, makes notes, and works out the structure, is relatively brief. “I don’t want to live a writer’s life,” she said, by which she meant one shackled to a computer, “so I’m unemployed most of the time. My process is very uncomfortable. The hardest stage is to overcome the fakery, and I can’t associate with people while I’m doing that. But the writing part is pure technique. It’s a performance, like getting on a stage, and before I start I have to have rehearsed everything I want to say, and to know what’s in my sentences.” In Cusk’s recent novels, it isn’t the drama of the events but their specificity that keeps you riveted. Many experimental writers have rejected the mechanics of storytelling, but Cusk has found a way to do so without sacrificing its tension. Where the action meanders, language takes up the slack. Her sentences hum with intelligence, like a neural pathway.
At the beginning of “Outline,” Faye flies to Athens, where she teaches a summer writing workshop. She accepts an invitation from her seatmate on the plane, a Greek businessman, to go out on his speedboat, where she gets a sunburn and fends off his advances. Her students are asked what they noticed on their way to class, and, later, assigned to write about an animal. Local friends entertain her, though mostly with their travails, and, on the morning that she is to leave, Faye finds a playwright named Anne, her replacement at the school, eating honey with a spoon in her living room. Anne confides that, following a mugging, she discovered that a word or two—“jealousy,” for example—would sum up the idea she had for a new piece of work, and there would then be no reason to go on with it. This had even happened to her with people, and since “Anne’s life” summed up her daily existence she could no longer see its point.
In “Transit,” whose title refers to the predictions of an Internet astrologer “too obviously based on a human type to be, herself, human,” Faye buys the top floor of a derelict house in a choice location and renovates it with the help of contractors from Poland and Albania. Her downstairs neighbors, longtime residents of the gentrifying neighborhood, hate her with a vengeance, and try to sabotage her. She visits a beauty salon, where she changes her hair color, and a boy in the next chair, furious at being shorn, explodes into violence. Two best-selling male memoirists, with whom she shares the stage at a rain-sodden reading, dominate the event. A kind man with bad teeth takes her out, and tells her the story of his adoption.
Faye’s encounters are orchestrated like a fugue, with each voice taking up the theme: the quest for freedom from a false self—a stock character one has been forced to play by parents who extort compliance, or by a mate who imposes submission as the price for love. By resigning oneself to those terms, Faye tells the kind man, one stops being alive; living becomes “merely an act of reading to find out what happens next.”
Rachel Cusk was born in Saskatchewan, on February 8, 1967, to a British couple who had moved to Canada. She was the second of their four children, an older girl and two younger boys. Carolyn, her mother, came from a large Catholic family in Hertfordshire. Peter, her father, a Protestant from Yorkshire, converted to Catholicism before their marriage.
The Cusks met at a tennis club, in the early nineteen-sixties. Peter had trained as an accountant, but “he was driven and aggressive,” Cusk said, and he hankered for adventure. In Canada, and later in Los Angeles, he moved up the corporate ladder, and the perks of success—“the Mercedes and so on”—were, Cusk felt, of unseemly importance to him. Carolyn, she told me, was a “very pretty,” “extraordinarily vain,” and “priggish” girl who “wasn’t educated, though she should have been.” She had a “powerful personality,” but no channel or ambition for it outside the family. (Carolyn Cusk said on the phone that she studied at Central Saint Martins, one of England’s premier art schools, and that at one point she had a successful interior-design business.)
Cusk’s feelings about her parents are still raw, and she seems to harbor wrath at past wrongs that no triumph of literary sublimation has been able to propitiate. On certain birthdays, she told me, “I would get a call from my mom reminding me of the torment she had gone through on that date.” Cusk’s birth, in an understaffed hospital during a blizzard, was long and difficult. Cusk suggested that her father blamed her for the trauma his wife had suffered, because he always seemed angry with her. When she reached puberty, she began to feel that her developing body was “disgusting.” “I always felt repellent,” Cusk said. “That has come out in my work, unfortunately, as disgust for the repellent qualities of other people.” Both Peter and Carolyn were first-born children and perhaps, Cusk said, their birth order caused them to favor her older sister. Only once in her life did she believe that they loved her: in the period of anguish and self-starvation when her first marriage ended. (The Cusks were shocked by Rachel’s view of them, which they consider distorted.)
Cusk’s parents had also “divorced” her, as she put it, although, as in the narrative of her breakup with Clarke, there are two sides to the story. She tells of a loveless and repressive childhood, in which her parents, she claimed, “blamed me for everything,” and she often felt like an outcast. Her mother’s prudishness and conformity were, by Cusk’s account, stifling not only to the young Rachel. On the morning after she and Scamell-Katz were married—in “a fantastic party on the beach,” she said—“I met my father in the kitchen. ‘I didn’t realize there were men like that,’ he said of Siemon and his friends, who had been dancing wildly around a bonfire in knee-high boots. And he wished he could have been like them, boots and all. Because his own wildness had been domesticated by my mother.”
In “Coventry,” an essay in Granta, Cusk describes how her parents would stop speaking to her completely, for long periods of time, to make her pay for “offenses actual or hypothetical.” “Being sent to Coventry,” she explains, is an English expression that means, essentially, getting frozen out. “It is the attempt to recover power through withdrawal, rather as a powerless child indignantly imagines his own death as a punishment to others. . . . My mother and father seem to believe they are inflicting a terrible loss on me by disappearing from my life.” Cusk often had no idea what her offenses had been, even as an adult, though one has to wonder if some of them weren’t related to the fact that a woman like the mother whom Cusk described to me—a perfect storm of narrow-mindedness, seething resentments, and vituperative retaliation—figures in several of her novels.
The last of these Coventries began on a winter Sunday in Norfolk, two years ago, and Scamell-Katz thought that something he said had provoked it. “We heard they were having some troubles,” he explained, “so we asked them up for the weekend and looked after them. Rachel’s father seemed grateful that she was on more solid ground with me” than she had been with Clarke. “But, at the end of the dinner, I put my arm around Rachel, and asked them why they thought she was so honest, and how they thought they had influenced her work.” They seemed to stiffen a little, he said. After they left, there was no call or thank-you note, and six months passed without contact. Cusk eventually decided that her life was better with her parents out of it. Her daughters were free to see their grandparents, she writes in the essay, but “I myself don’t wish to re-enter that arena. I don’t want to leave Coventry. I’ve decided to stay.”
Like Clarke, Peter and Carolyn had some objections to Cusk’s account of their parting ways. Peter could not recall any conversation about masculinity in his daughter’s kitchen, or any men in knee-high boots. He did, however, remember that at the dinner in Norfolk he had made some disparaging remarks about “Wolf Hall,” a novel by Hilary Mantel, who had encouraged Cusk’s work, and that his daughter had lashed out at him. The words had stung, he said, so he had remembered them: ‘You know nothing, and no one cares what you think anyway.’ ”
When Rachel was a baby, her father accepted a new job, in Los Angeles. Cusk imagined, she told an interviewer, that, as “stuffily brought-up people,” they had wanted to “let their hair down,” but that the hedonism of Southern California had been “frightening” to them. (What was more frightening, according to the elder Cusks, was the fact that the Manson family’s murder of Sharon Tate took place three hundred yards from their house.) They moved to rural Suffolk when Cusk was eight, and three years later, in 1978, she followed her sister Sarah to a convent boarding school, St. Mary’s, in Cambridge. The heroine of “Saving Agnes” is an alumna of such an institution: a hotbed of “female cruelty.”
Sarah went on to Cambridge, and Rachel to Oxford, where for the first time, she said, “I had the experience of people treating me kindly, and sharing my interests.” On a shelf in her office, there is a snapshot of her from that period. The girl in the picture has a dreamy gaze, and thick, badly cut hair; she is holding a cigarette in an elongated hand. There is a lot of smoking in Cusk’s fiction, and she started at a young age, despite the fact that she suffered from severe asthma—perhaps, she suggested, as a result of her ordeal at birth. “Being in control of my own destruction,” she said wryly, “has always seemed like a solution for it.”
Cusk and Clarke met at Oxford, but she had a very brief first marriage before they reconnected. If her parents had been afraid to let their hair down, she wasn’t. “I equated sexuality with truth,” she said of her libidinous twenties. “Inhabiting my body powerfully was the key to it. Sex has always been incredibly interesting to me, and it becomes more so. Which is strange, because my self-consciousness is so extreme.”
Albertine was conceived when Cusk was thirty-one. Some women are never happier than when they are pregnant. For others, a swelling womb threatens their integrity—their literal self-possession. And becoming a mother raises the spectre of becoming your own mother. One of Cusk’s beefs with Carolyn is that “no one taught me how to be a woman”—though, actually, she was taught, and she rejected the lessons. “What do I understand by the term ‘female’?” she asks in “A Life’s Work”: “A false thing; a repository of the cosmetic . . . a world in which words such as suffering, self-control and endurance occur, but usually in reference to weight loss; a world steeped in its own mild, voluntary oppression, a world at whose fringes one may find intersections to the real: to particular kinds of unhappiness, or discrimination, or fear.” In getting pregnant, she writes, “I have the sense of stepping off the proper path of my life.”
“A Life’s Work” is at once a cri de coeur, a prison diary, and a repudiation of Catholic Mary-worship (even though she prays “superstitiously” to the Virgin in a moment of “madness”). The memoir is heretically funny, though its humor is driven by dread. When Cusk has trouble nursing, she takes her newborn to a breast-feeding clinic, where the “babies boil like a row of angry kettles.” Her daughter’s “pure and pearly being requires considerable maintenance. At first my relation to it is that of a kidney.” Albertine suffers colic, and Cusk reads Dr. Spock—a gift from Carolyn, of all people. “Spock’s babies,” she writes, “are cheerful souls in spite of . . . their constant gastro-enteritis and chronic excrescences of the skin.” Still, she notes, “in their anomic, tyrannical hearts they like to know who’s boss, for weakness drives them to enslave and dominate.”
At the outset of the memoir, Cusk warns the reader that she is writing in “the first heat” of the transformation from active subject to passive vessel. But as she gets used to the climate of maternity her own piercing wail abates. There are no sudden paroxysms of beatitude, just a subtle shift. She reads a poem by Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight,” and notices, for the first time, that there is a baby in it. “It is a poem about sitting still,” she writes, “about the way children act as anchors on the body and eventually the mind.” The love it expresses “is a restitution.” Reality begins when an infant gazing at her mother first intuits the existence of a self beyond her own, but for a mother it can begin at the same moment. Cusk told me that she would have been a different writer if she hadn’t had children: “I would have been a minor lyricist.” The compromise of motherhood, she continued, is an essential aspect of female reality, “and if you design an uncompromised life for yourself” you sever a vital artery. “Something has to be sacrificed.”
Cusk is Scamell-Katz’s fourth wife. (He appended his first wife’s surname to his when they married.) His third wife, a yoga teacher with whom he has a teen-age son, Foiy, lives near them in Norfolk, and their relations are amicable. After that divorce, he bought some land in Stiffkey, and he and Cusk have been building a house there together. Their property is semi-secluded, off a winding lane, with a distant view of the North Sea. Scamell-Katz, who has a background in design, acted as their architect, and, with his owlish glasses and dandified clothes, you might mistake him for one. In a neighborhood of manses and cottages, the house makes, as its owners do, a statement of nonconformity. The façade is a patchwork of corrugated metal and raw slate, and the interiors are austerely modernist. Cusk found the industrial windows on eBay—they had been fabricated for a school that was never built—and she scoured the site for bargain fixtures and furnishings. “There is a certain type of vender you can always trust,” she said. “She’s a materialist who buys too much, then feels guilty and gets rid of her mistakes at a loss.” (An oversized sofa, which barely fitted through the doorway, arrived while I was there.)
Family houses have a central place in Cusk’s fiction, perhaps because she has lived in, fled, fixed up, envied, hated, yearned for, abandoned, and been dispossessed of an unusual number, along with the promises of happiness that they represented. “Freedom,” Faye says, toward the end of “Transit,” “is a home you leave once and can never go back to.” In an essay for the New York Times Magazine on remodelling her flat, Cusk describes how she gutted the rooms and threw away “decades’ worth of clutter,” but then missed the abandon sanctioned by shabbiness, in which no one had to worry about defiling a pristine sofa or scratching the floor. Men she knows are as obsessive about housekeeping as women, but their décor doesn’t define them in the same way. On one hand, they don’t have the feminist’s temptation to prove that she isn’t trivial by not caring about appearances; on the other, they “never seem quite so trammeled or devoured by domesticity. . . . It may be the last laugh of patriarchy that men are better at being women than women are.”
Her own marriage may be a case in point. When Cusk and Scamell-Katz told me about their trip to Scotland, she recalled the beauty of their conversations, and he recalled having brought emergency provisions—a goose and wine—on the train with them. Where she is conscientious about domestic chores, nurture seems to give him unguilty pleasure. He does much of the cooking (he left the pub early to start dinner), and it’s easy to see how the tenderness of a virile man would appeal to a woman as conflicted as Cusk is about femininity. “I’m a bit in awe of Siemon’s patience and self-control as a parent,” she said.
Scamell-Katz, like Faye’s date in “Transit,” was adopted as a baby by a modest family, and when he was still a child his birth mother wrote to his parents asking for a photo. His father tore up her letter in a fit of rage, but then, feeling remorseful, he taped the pieces back together, and handed them to Siemon on his eighteenth birthday. Until he sold his company, eleven years ago, at the age of forty-one, Scamell-Katz made his living as a marketing guru. He wrote a book on the subject, “The Art of Shopping,” and he still does some consulting. (His alimony, Cusk noted crisply, has dented their income.) Marriage and fatherhood are now his prime occupations, along with painting: a long-deferred passion. His studio, however—a ramshackle quonset hut—suggests a certain self-abnegation, particularly compared with the office that he built for Cusk, in an annex to the main house. Her two-room study is panelled in blond wood and skirted by a private deck; light streams through the windows, which look out on the garden; there is a wall of bookshelves, mostly still bare, except for some essential volumes, and among them was a novel I didn’t know, “In Love,” by the British screenwriter Alfred Hayes, which was published in the nineteen-fifties. It speaks intimately to Cusk, and she wanted me to have it. Hayes, she said, “gives you an amazingly precise representation of what the world looks like if there’s no love in it.”
During my visit, Cusk’s daughters had been staying at their father’s house, in part so that their mother could work but also because Albertine had wanted to be in London. During the Easter weekend, there had been an argument over their living arrangements, which had brought Cusk to tears, and they’d had a “seminal” conversation to hash things out. “All I want,” she told her husband, “is for them to treat me as conventional people treat their mothers.” Scamell-Katz pointed out that she hadn’t raised them to be conventional people, she had raised them to be free women, so she shouldn’t complain when they brandished that freedom at her.
Later that week, I met Cusk and her daughters in Highgate for a quiet early dinner in an empty trattoria. Cusk and Jessye were there when I arrived, and Albertine came a little later—she was taking a walk to clear her head from the stress of schoolwork. The girls are so close in age (eighteen and seventeen) and in appearance (small, sturdy, and beautiful, in a different register from their mother) that you might mistake them for fraternal twins. But when I asked Jessye if she would miss Albertine, who leaves for university in the fall, she said that she wouldn’t—she’d have more room in the flat—and Albertine burst into tears. Cusk, who was tenser than I had seen her—alert to every nuance of her daughters’ moods—delicately set about repairing the damage.
I saw Cusk once more, at home in Tufnell Park. After she met Scamell-Katz, he persuaded her to sell the fixer-upper that Faye buys in “Transit”—the one with the vile neighbors. Her current flat is the upper duplex of a Victorian row house on a pleasant street, with bedrooms on the top floor, off a small terrace, and an open living area beneath them. The apartment makes up in flair what it lacks in scale, with interesting modern art, a smart orange kitchen, and ikea furniture. It is homier and more bohemian than the house in Norfolk.
Cusk was still struggling with “Kudos.” (She finished the book last week.) “It feels like I’m pregnant with a lawnmower, something large and sharp that I have to expel,” she said. Last year, she interrupted her work to help Albertine with her university applications. “For the first time, I found myself tinkering with a manuscript. In some ways, that was interesting. There was a funny freedom to having less control. But the messing around also annoyed me, and the work wasn’t as good.”
“Kudos” is the ancient Greek word for “honor” or “glory.” “Female honor is the burnish of having survived your experiences without being destroyed by them, and female glory has to do with moral integrity,” Cusk said. She cited Medea as an example of both. Medea is an early antiheroine in literature, and the progenitor of all the alienées whose crimes are a reproach to the hypocrisies that underpin civilization. (Camus’s Meursault is her direct descendant.) She is a princess with magical powers who betrays her homeland for an ambitious Greek—Jason—in exchange for his promise to marry her. They escape to Corinth, where Medea bears Jason two sons, and they supposedly live happily for a while, though one rather doubts it. Jason is a congenital opportunist, and when he is given a chance to marry Glauce, the beautiful daughter of his host in exile, he tells Medea that, unfortunately, he has to leave her—but it’s nothing personal. Medea sends her boys to Glauce with a wedding gift, a golden cloak steeped in poison. She dies horribly, along with her father, who tries to save her. You can’t really begrudge Medea these murders, but there is one last cord to cut, and she agonizes over it. In the end, she decides to break Jason’s heart, though it means breaking her own, and she kills their children.
Two years ago, the Almeida Theatre, in London, commissioned Cusk to adapt Euripedes’ “Medea” for the contemporary stage. She had thought deeply about Greek tragedy, but other plays had meant more to her. If she’d had any notions about “Medea,” she wrote in an essay on the adaptation, they were that “the play’s premise—the murder of two children by their mother—had attained a troubling sort of autonomy that exposed it to all sorts of cultural misuses,” misogynistic ones. “ ‘Medea’ seemed to operate as a byword for maternal ambivalence.”
Cusk read it differently—as a play about a feral divorce, and about an “entirely familiar” woman who “broadcasts both her own pain and the larger injustices” of which women were victims twenty-five hundred years ago, and still are, in her view, despite the “lip service” that society pays to equality.
One thing that has changed is the audience for “Medea.” In 431 B.C., when it made its début, at the festival of Dionysus, the crowd was largely male (Greek women were cloistered from the public sphere), and men didn’t like the fact that a barbarian sorceress who defies patriarchal authority escapes her comeuppance in a winged chariot. Critics of the Almeida production had a few qualms, but not about what Susannah Clapp, in the Observer, called the “coruscating” power of the writing. Clapp continued, “It is Cusk’s skill to show both a compendium of grievances and a woman whose grief exceeds them—who cannot be reconciled. This makes her play a true tragedy.” Cusk’s Medea doesn’t kill her children—in part, she explained, because in modern terms the act would make her a psychotic, and Cusk sees her as “an ultimate realist,” who is “determined to honour the logic of her own conclusions.”
“Medea,” Cusk’s first play, also gave her an opportunity to explore some of her own conclusions, especially about feminism. You can trace their evolution in her writing, from “Saving Agnes,” where she describes feminism as “a placebo of self-acceptance,” and “A Life’s Work,” which rejects the pieties that make a woman’s biological “destiny” to bear children seem sacred, through the argument with herself about gender in “Aftermath,” and, finally, to the last scene of “Transit.” Faye has been invited to a dinner party by her cousin. He and his new wife own a fancy country place. The other guests are traditionally married couples, and their squabbles are a throwback to Cusk’s earlier fiction. At first, you wonder why she would resurrect this milieu; then you realize that she has to revisit her revulsion for the doll’s house before leaving it forever. A fog closes in; the next morning, Faye feels a change stirring beneath her. Silently, she lets herself out.
Cusk’s phone beeped with a text, and she excused herself for a minute. When she returned, she looked upset—she had forgotten an appointment, she would have to rush off, and she apologized profusely for ending our talk so abruptly. There was a last question I had hesitated to ask: Why, given her history, did she risk remarriage? She thought for a minute as we gathered up our things. “I’m very strong,” she said. “The strongest thing about me is my honesty. Not that it has helped me to be better at living. I have used my strength for the purposes of destruction. But now I can use it to build something that will last.”
Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987 and became a staff writer in 2000. She is the author of “Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire.”
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