FICTION
Transit
Rachel Cusk
Jonathan Cape, $32.99
Since British author Rachel Cusk's fiction took an exciting turn in 2014 critics have been struggling to pinpoint what makes it so compelling. They have compared her novel Outline – now followed by its sequel, Transit – to the writing of J.M. Coetzee, Jenny Offill, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Harold Pinter and even a Greek chorus. But the best comparison is surely to her late countryman W.G. Sebald, author of The Rings of Saturn.
Sebald and Cusk, in her past two books, inhabit an essayistic first-person prose of flattened feeling, which is related to the effects of past trauma. Sebald and Cusk's narrators are less characters than adept collectors: it's other characters who pour out their stories in their quietly attentive presences. Structurally, both authors make use of the little-known "anatomy" form identified by literary theorist Northrop Frye. The anatomy's energy comes not from plot but the obsessive dissection of its subject; it is episodic, its sections opening like an advent calendar's window onto variations on a theme.
Outline and Transit operate in more urbane, female-centred territory; that of a cosmopolitan, mobile and oddly beleaguered professional class. Each covers a small period in the life of Fay, a writer struggling after a failed marriage.
This isn't new terrain for 49-year-old Cusk. The author of seven jittery novels of suburban manners, she is better known for the vitriol surrounding her non-fictional depiction of personal events. A Life's Work, her clear-eyed 2001 account of new motherhood, saw her typecast in some quarters as self-pitying and unkind, but it was Aftermath, the raw 2012 account of the death of her 10-year marriage, which attracted the most venom. "In Cusk's world," Camilla Long wrote in The Sunday Times, "even the canapes are victims."
Outline and Transit continue Cusk's obsession with divorce's fallout but with a new approach prompted by these attacks. In 2014, Cusk admitted that they had made her lose faith in narrative; even fictional invention felt "fake and embarrassing". Regrouping, she has forged a more dynamic and liberating form, which cocks a snook at fiction's staples of plot and dialogue. Combining the general shape of Cusk's life with an exaggeratedly "documentary" approach, these novels carry the combined charge of fiction and non-fiction.
In Outline, Fay – reeling from a recent divorce – heads to Greece to teach a week-long creative-writing course. She devotes each episode of her account to someone she encounters: a Greek businessman, an insecure tutor, a successful writer, students. They deliver self-absorbed monologues, with Fay as observant but numb amanuensis. It gradually dawns on the reader that each tale turns around the same moment: when their lives diverged from their ideal "outline". That's it, but the effect is oddly gripping, like watching invisible ink develop.
As Transit opens, Fay, still struggling, receives an email from a computer-generated astrologer: "a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky." This cleverly introduced theme of fate looms over every moment. Fay buys a London apartment from public housing, above noxious tenants; she meets and listens to a philosophically inclined real estate agent, an old boyfriend who hasn't changed his clothes since their breakup, and lugubrious workmen. Their monologues are complex, contradictory, sometimes wise, and fascinating. Again, the thematic fixation on destiny suffuses every detail with addictive energy.
In one of the novel's set pieces, Fay is almost talked off stage at a dismal writer's festival by two male writers: the fatuous author of a misery memoir, and the Knausgaardian writer of extreme autobiography. After they deliver their long monologues, she simply reads a story. This is the closest Cusk comes to a manifesto. Here is her answer to those anxiously policing the borders of fiction and non-fiction – her books speak for themselves. They are also creative arguments for shutting up and listening.
Transit ends at a bleakly hilarious country dinner party among Britain's self-absorbed rural rich; so smug, so certain of their freedoms, and yet so appallingly at sea. I suspect Cusk's books are also garnering such praise because they lay bare something about this end-of-days period in history in which everything is in flux while we have never seemed more stuck. You can draw a line from Robert Burton's 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy straight to Transit, which so brilliantly captures the complex and precarious feelings of our present.