The reader, by necessity, may want more from Faye. In the trilogy, Faye’s resource in her interlocutors allows her, cannily, to fade into the background. The gossip angle becomes a sly twist of the first-person point of view, a tradition whose imperative tends to favor the ego writ large. (Maybe we can be forgiven for thinking this autofiction.) Quite simply, and maybe obliquely, Cusk’s novels are about life’s unrelenting demands on the psyche and, more particularly, the writer’s psyche. The novels become about the idealized writing life that Cusk herself must lead.
Of the overarching themes of the trilogy, Cusk is working out notions about the difficulty of single parenthood while maintaining a creative life, accompanied by the overt subtext of the narrative: the successful writer’s life, the object lessons of other people’s problems-all of which instills an empathetic connection as it forces a reader to be a sounding board. It has the effect of making information essential, vital. There is an intimacy to this secondarily told story, as the circumstances of its being related feel as if it is told in private, like gossip. This approach seems so novel, and surprising-and a clever way out of the I centric first-person point of view-that you might wonder why someone hadn’t thought of it sooner. By the last volume, Kudos, you the reader are fully acclimated to the narrator, Faye’s, encounters with a series of characters who reflect her concerns and highlight the trilogy’s themes.Ĭuriously, and this is the feature the reader learns from the consistency of method, Faye is the rare first-person narrator who remains in the background, mostly, mediating what is told to her, taking the reader into her confidence. In the novels that make up Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, the education could go like this: the confounding of motive of the first novel ( Outline) gives way to the vertigo inducing ease of the second ( Transit).
In Reviews tagged Rachel Cusk / Robert Detman by Kristina Marie DarlingĪ novel teaches you how to read it.
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