The Nature of Things

I had been looking forward to this third entry in Rachel Cusk's Outline series. I found the two earlier books, Outline and Transit , to be remarkable works that were thought-provoking reads. With the release of Kudos , one can see now that all three are pieces of a whole and they fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces in the narrative that Cusk has constructed. Cusk's story-teller once again is Faye, a middle-aged writer divorced from the father of her two sons and now remarried, although that marriage seems to play a very small role in her daily life. Faye travels - a lot it seems. She's always on the go to conferences or literary festivals or publicity tours that her publisher has arranged to promote her latest book. And in her travels, she constantly meets people who want to talk to her, who want to tell her the stories of their lives and their innermost secrets. Faye reports these mostly one-way conversations to us unedited and there is something almost magical in the ...

I feel hypnotized by Rachel Cusk's method of storytelling. We sit down with our friend, Rachel, or Faye as she is known in the book, and she proceeds to tell us the story of her interactions and conversations with any number of people who have crossed paths with her.  Thus, we get to eavesdrop on her conversations with two of her friends, with fellow writers at a book festival, with her Eastern European builders, an ex-lover, her hair stylist, one of her students, etc. All of these conversations focus on the other person, with Faye as the listener, the confidante, counsellor, or confessor. Nothing much happens here and yet the reader is utterly transfixed by the unfolding tale. We met Faye in Outline , the first book of this planned trilogy. She is a writer and teacher. She is recently divorced and semi-broke. In this book, she has just moved to London with her two young sons and has bought a run-down ex-council property in a good neighborhood, and now she is trying to renovate it....

What do we know about the narrator of Rachel Cusk's novel? Her name is Faye. She is a writer. She lives in London and is divorced. She is the mother of more than one child. She has taken a job teaching a summer writing course in Athens. That's about it. We never get below the surface with her. She remains a cipher. This cipher, however, seems to have the ability to inspire other people to reveal their deepest secrets. Throughout this very unusual and very intelligent book, Faye has a number of conversations with people that she encounters and all of these people end up telling her stories about themselves and all the people they are closest to in their lives. Her first encounter happens on the plane when she is flying from London to Athens to take up her summer job. She sits next to an older man, a Greek who is returning home. He unburdens himself about his failed marriages. Initially, he mentions only two but we learn later that he has actually had three. He talks about his ch...