Transit by Rachel Cusk review – a triumphant follow-up to Outline
Rachel Cusk’s new novel is tremendous from its opening sentence. “An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future.” How inspired and witty, to begin with a spam email – and carrying a message that sounds as momentous as if it might have come from the oracle at Delphi. The “movements of the planets” represent “a zone of infinite reverberation to human destiny”; the portentousness is absurd, and stirring. The email is obviously generated by a mere algorithm, as the narrator grasps at once; she isn’t fooled. And yet, because it’s positioned there at the very entrance to the novel, we also know that the prophecy speaks to her sensibility, it really does open up the future for her. Messages from Delphi, after all, were pretty generalised, as if they were generated randomly.
Cusk is always an exciting writer: striking and challenging, with a distinctive cool prose voice, and behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force, even rash. One never feels her writing is trying to be liked, and in the past her memoirs of motherhood and of divorce have been both loved and hated by her readers, because of what’s abrasive and singular in them. In her last novel, Outline, about a woman teaching creative writing in Greece, and now in Transit, where the same woman, Faye, is back in London, making a new life for herself after a separation from her husband, she has developed a radically new novel form that works triumphantly, I think, with just what’s distinctive in her writing personality.
Both these novels are constructed as a sequence of stories which are only connected through being told to Faye. In Transit, for instance, we hear from an ex-boyfriend (he lost a dog and got into a relationship); from a writer who reads with Faye at a festival (he was tormented by his cruel stepfather); from a student who comes to her for tutorials (she is obsessed with the life of an American painter); and from her builder (his father mocked him when he built a beautiful house in the woods at home in Poland). It sounds as if I’m describing a succession of linked short stories, but that isn’t quite how it reads. The different stories somehow don’t exist in separate compartments, and they don’t offer, at the point when they’re dropped, any neat lift of completion. Faye’s own underlying story – a divorce, a move back to London, the purchase of a flat, building work, conflict with nightmare neighbours downstairs – remains the core of the book, the thread on which the rest is strung. Chapters are punctuated by more or less desperate calls from her younger son, who is staying at his father’s while the building work is done. Towards the end of the novel, touched in with great delicacy, there’s an emerging love story.
This way of sequencing narrative feels like an elegant formal solution to the problem of the sheer force of personality in Cusk’s writing. It’s a striking gesture of relinquishment. Faye’s story contends for space against all these others, and the novel’s meaning is devolved out from its centre in her to a succession of characters. It’s a radically different way of imagining a self, too – Faye’s self. She’s never merged inside the others’ stories, she doesn’t give herself over to them; on the contrary, there is as much antagonism as there is sympathy in her relations to all these others; and many of them misread her, or criticise her. Faye is fairly guarded, too; she often receives their stories in silence, or her questioning only elicits more narration. And yet there she is, crowded in among them all on the page – not one with them, but immersed among them. As a way of representing the involuntary immersion of our individual selves in a teeming, crowded world, it’s rather brilliant.
Faye is helpless to resist these tales which bump up accidentally against her, which are delivered to her unsolicited and yet only come into being through her listening. This novel feels like a very active form of listening: not a particularly kindly listening, but not a satirical one either. Either sympathy or mockery would feel more watertight, as listening positions, than what happens here. It’s as if Faye’s narrative is flooded with other stories, invaded by them; at times they almost override her own trajectory. Even when, at the end of the book, her own story suggests a closure of a kind, all those others’ stories remain incomplete, still insisting on our attention.
Cusk's language is vivid and exact – her prose is scrupulously attentive to the gritty detail in the stories she tellsThe novel’s language is spare and vivid and exact, never inflated. There’s no exaggerated effort to imitate the accents or voices of the various storytellers, and yet the prose is scrupulously attentive to the gritty detail in what they tell. This is Pavel the builder: “He had come to England and worked for a few months building the new terminal at Heathrow, being routinely sacked on a Friday night and rehired on a Monday, because the building company never knew in advance how many labourers they’d need.” All these stories count, they’re urgent, it’s important to get them down: not only the Polish builder’s troubles but also the hairdresser realising he doesn’t want to go out clubbing any more, and the friend who is late for a coffee because her sprinkler system’s just malfunctioned, drenching her house and all her clothes.
In Faye’s strange phase of near-passivity, waiting for her new life to begin, she functions almost as a recording angel, giving herself over in her vulnerable openness to what they need to tell. Colouring everything, like dark ink in the clear water of this prose, is a pervasive mood of melancholy and controlled excitement which is very visual – Cusk is brilliant at interiors, capturing a city busy changing itself at feverish speed. Her austere, ruminative voice doesn’t sound quite like any other writer’s; she never gushes or confesses.
In the morning it was still dark when I got up. Downstairs the ruins of dinner remained on the table. The melted candles were hardened into sprawling shapes. Jake’s book lay open on the chair … Through the windows a strange subterranean light was rising, barely distinguishable from darkness. I felt change moving beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things, like the plates of earth blindly moving in their black traces.
All too often there is a trade-off between formal experiments in literature and reading pleasure, but the joy of Transit is that it’s so eminently readable. One of Faye’s fellow writers at the festival is disappointed that people have found his thousand-page novel tediously long; he was only trying to capture the “low-lying truth of his ordinary existence” where nothing eventful happened. And yet this writer admits himself that when he chooses a passage to read out, he too is drawn to those rare places where the point is concentrated and “life could be observed in a meaningful arrangement”. Transit steers with stylishness and grace between the low-lying truths and the significant dramas we compose for ourselves out of the accidents which befall us. Offering no hostages to convention, it’s somehow page-turningly enthralling and charged with the power to move. Cusk has tuned in to our curiosity about the lives of others, and composed out of that curiosity something capacious and generous, making room for all the contradictory stories clamouring for space on her page.
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