RACHEL CUSK — OUTLINE TRILOGY

Image: author photo

Picking up from a previous entry. Plot’s not why anyone came to this party, but here’s the plot anyway: writer goes to writerly conference, talks to people and has a terrible time. 

In the second installment (Kudos), she makes some renovations to an apartment — also a terrible time. She talks to people, mainly people who seem to have a lot of philosophical content to share (and share generously). 

Not much changes about the narrator over the course of these interview (sometimes they’re literally interviews), but towards the end of the cycle, she starts to put names to what she’s experiencing and feeling. Experiencing: evil. Feeling: anger. 

To me, ‘evil’ seemed a leap from the rich humanity I thought I was reading about; anger a leap more because of the unintelligibility of the narrator’s emotions. The naming of the thing didn’t bother me, nor did I find it necessary. As mentioned, names come late in the cycle, and so they flavor mostly later events (“oh, she must be feeling angry here”). 

As themes, evil and anger join a larger meta-theme: writers gotta name stuff. Throughout the novel there are lexicographical asides that I think support my claim, but I’m not going to go into specifics, in part because two of the three novels are sitting in my teenage room in NH while I write this in Brussels. 

Look, I don’t often go for writers writing about the experience of being a writer, but it’s hard not to love this: the world is generous to this author’s eyes, or the eyes have a rare perceptiveness, but either way the reader benefits. Ms. Cusk’s way of parsing the speech and actions of people makes sense out of the senseless. She’s ideally suited to be doing what she does in these novels: listening, trying to parse — the act of trying/straining is also on display. Truth comes in an uninterrupted flow, and the trilogy comes as a gift to those who want to look closer and who are ready for the truth about people. 

…Extra points for not ennobling the act of writing in the least. Ms. Cusk has made a necessary sacrifice for those who wondered what the business and banality of being a writer is like. She has suffered and she has given of the truth of her life. This was inspiring. It made me want to write something true.

It may also have sharpened my eyes a bit — we’ll see. If you get into Freud you start reading the world in the language of Freud. Sometimes I now find myself reading the world in the language of Cusk.