‘Transit’ by Rachel Cusk

A novel, to paraphrase Stendhal, is a mirror travelling down a road. In Outline (2015) and Transit – the first two published volumes of a proposed trilogy – Canadian-born, UK-based novelist Rachel Cusk offers disconcerting reflections about the way we live. The daily life of her narrator, Faye, takes her through the streets of London. There, she segues among a chorus of disparate voices and chronicles the disconnected lives and secrets of those she encounters, all the while maintaining an often icy mystery about herself.

Transit opens after the narrator returns to London from teaching a summer writing seminar in Greece, a trip that Cusk recounts in Outline. The narrator’s philosophy, as we find it in Transit, is that “Freedom is a home you leave once and can never go back to.” Divorced and raising her children alone, she strives...