Outline, Transit, and Kudos
When I was a kid, I loved book series.
I devoured Franklin and Berenstain Bears, then later Ramona, Little House on the Prairie, and The Boxcar Children. The Scholastic Book Fair was my Super Bowl – an annual opportunity to bolster my collection of not only stickers and posters, but also my beloved Goosebumps and Sweet Valley High ‘chapter books.’ In Grade Two, I remember cheering when I got chicken pox because it meant my Mom would buy me a Babysitter’s Club boxed set and I could curl up in her big Queen-sized bed all week, inhaling one book after another.
Even as a teenager, I read series without reservation. I queued for Harry Potter releases and borrowed my Gram’s dogeared Sue Grafton, Tom Clancy, and Mary Higgins Clark paperbacks. I practically built my freshman dorm décor aesthetic around Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic books.
And then I grew up and got snobby. I favored literary fiction. I began buying books based on Staff Picks and Obama’s reading lists. I mercilessly mocked my husband’s love of Brandon Sanderson and my mom’s predilection for Jodi Picoult. I even let my bias against series make me several years late to the Elena Ferrante party.
Now, I feel differently. The door that Ferrante cracked open has since swung wide, making room on my shelf for Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Cormac McCarthy’s Border books, and Rachel Cusk’s slim trio of novels – Outline, Transit, and Kudos. Late last year, I read all three at a feverish pace not seen since my chicken pox days and fell deeply for the books’ strange structure, lovely language, and enigmatic main character.
In Outline, the first book in the series, a writer named Faye goes to Greece for a week to teach a course and Cusk reports upon the conversations she has along the way. Each conversation is a peek into the life of some fleeting character – a co-worker, a friend, a neighbor, or simply someone Faye sits next to on a plane – and the conversations are almost always about ruined relationships. Faye’s recollection of each chat unspools in long monologues, without interruption or quotation marks, like the stream of someone else’s consciousness. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before.
Transit, the second novel, is set in London in the aftermath of Faye’s divorce, as she’s renovating a crumbling house in a fashionable neighborhood. Kudos, the last, follows Faye while she travels from one writing conference to another, giving talks and being interviewed. This same structure – encounter a person, listen to their life story, offer an opinion or two, then repeat – plays out across all three novels. It’s a testament to the beauty and originality of the stories Faye hears that neither the content nor the structure grows old.
Below I’ve gathered some of my favorite bits of Faye’s conversations and observations. Everything Cusk writes about is so common – our relationship with our bodies, the vulnerability of children, the horror of an unwanted advance, and the inevitability of death, for example. Yet in Cusk’s capable hands these themes feel profound. The magic of these books is in how perfectly they capture the sadness of ordinary people and situations.
“We passed over an arching concrete intersection in a blare of horns and engine noise, the sun pounding on the windscreen and the smell of petrol and asphalt and sewage flooding through the open windows, and for a while drove alongside a man on a scooter, who had a little boy of five or six seated behind him. The boy was clinging to the man with both arms around his middle. He looked so small and unprotected, with the cars and metal palisades and huge junk-laden lorries rushing inches past his skin. He wore only shorts and a vest and flip-flops on his feet, and I looked through the window at his unshielded tender brown limbs and at his soft golden-brown hair rippling in the wind.”
—
“He remembered the feeling of estrangement from his own body, as it labored in the damp, spore-ridden climate of the house; his clogged lungs and itchy skin, his veins full of sugar and fat, his wobbling flesh shrouded in uncomfortable clothing. He was self-conscious and sedentary and avoided any physical exposure of himself.”
—
“He came towards me, out of the shade and into the sun, heavily yet inexorably, like a prehistoric creature issuing from its cave. He bent down, moving awkwardly, and tried to embrace me from the side, putting one arm around my shoulders while attempting to bring his face into contact with mine. I could smell his breath and feel his bushy grey eyebrows grazing my skin. The great beak of his nose loomed at the edge of my field of vision, his claw-like hands with their white fur fumbled at my shoulders; I felt myself, momentarily, being wrapped around in his grayness and dryness, as though the prehistoric creature were wrapping me in its dry, bat-like wings, felt his scaly mouth miss its mark and move blindly at my cheek. Through the whole thing I stayed rigidly still, staring straight ahead of me at the steering wheel, until at last he withdrew, back into the shade.”
—
“I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting.”
—
“Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.”