Rachel Cusk’s Outline was one of the most remarkable novels of 2014, written with classic elegance and cool comic verve. It was also a very moving book. The title was exact, because the narrative line cut with forensic clarity as Cusk wrote of the individual’s isolation, self-delusion, pain and puniness in the world.
The narrator of Outline, Faye, reappears in Cusk’s new novel Transit. Faye is named only once in each novel and there is very sparing description of her exterior identity. Her family, appearance, childhood and upbringing are so far not part of the story. Faye’s recent history has already been established in Outline: she is a writer with two young sons, separated from the children’s father and living for the most part alone. The children are never present during the novels’ timespans. In Outline, they are back in London while Faye teaches a creative writing course in Athens, and in Transit they are with their father while Faye’s new flat in London is renovated.
This renovation is a tale in itself. Faye seems, in a fit of perverse determination, to have bought a place so vilely dilapidated that no one else could bear to take it on. Grim, vengeful troglodytes inhabit the basement. Filth strews the garden, floors buckle, plaster falls off in lumps. The builder’s verdict is that the entire house is a “can of worms” and this quickly comes to seem generous.
Cusk describes these scenes with a triumphant accuracy that nevertheless verges on the surreal and is very funny. Her writing, for all its laconic, pared-back grace, is rich in detail. In this layering of minute comic and observational touches she is very like Waugh and, like Waugh, she makes her points lightly but with force.
Faye sits in her dark kitchen late into the evening, watching the family next door with their well-kept garden and barbecue, their children playing in the summer night while guests talk and laugh in French, German or English, and she marvels that her own sordid, ruinous garden can exist side by side with such order. “It seemed so strange that these two extremes – the repellent and the idyllic, death and life – could stand only a few feet apart and remain mutually untransformed.”
There is also a suggestion here of something that Cusk described in Aftermath, her memoir of marital break-up: that is, the complex gaze directed by the separated woman towards the intact family.
Faye is divorced and divorce is evidence of change, but the fear that things will not and cannot change haunts this novel. She has returned to the area of London where she once lived with another partner, Gerard, who reappears so unaltered that he seems to be wearing the same shirt. He has kept in his flat a picture, books and other objects that were part of their life together.
“‘It’s strange,’” he said, ‘that you always changed everything and I changed nothing and yet we’ve both ended up in the same place.”’
This is a frightening enough comment, even if meant benignly, and that is uncertain, despite Gerard’s apparent goodwill. If Faye has come full circle, then does that in some sense neuter her efforts? The renovation of the flat will fail: the project begins to appear far-fetched, even absurd, while the people downstairs are overwhelmingly hostile to it.
Faye wants change but it keeps not happening. She goes to have her hair coloured, now that grey is appearing in it, and the hairdresser tells her that she should not try to restore her original colour. Instead, he is thinking more browns and reds, something lighter. “‘Even if it’s not what you naturally are,’ he said, ‘I think you’ll look more real that way.’” This scene culminates in a shattering outburst of violence. In fact, threat and aggression are always latent in Transit. When they burst out the effect is both shocking and oddly fulfilling, as if the last piece of a puzzle has slotted into place.
Cusk is clearly fascinated by the way that apparently civilised, highly ritualised occasions carry this latent charge of animal cruelty or aggression within them. One of the most excruciating episodes in the novel is an account of Faye’s appearance at a literary festival that is, fortunately, unnamed. She and the other panel members come on stage drenched with rain because the chair has not thought to take them along the covered walkway.
There they sit, entertaining the audience with the decorated bones of their lives (for two of them are memoirists). Faye’s hair drips down her back and her feet squelch in her sodden shoes. She is exposed, humiliated and yet at the same time oddly shielded by the glare of the stage lights. Finally, the chair takes Faye back to her hotel and kisses her repeatedly on the doorstep, thrusting his “warm, thick tongue” into her mouth. There is no sense that these kisses are desired, but neither are they rejected. The scene is grotesque, while its analysis of passivity and encroachment is brilliant.
Cusk is now working on a level that makes it very surprising that she has not yet won a major literary prize. Her technical originality is equalled by the compelling nature of her subject matter, and Transit is a very fine novel indeed.
Transit is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.93
