Part of the effect is due to Cusk’s handling of mood and tone, a skill she shares with Kazuo Ishiguro. In an especially affecting episode, a boy knocks over a display case in a salon where Faye is having her hair dyed. Throughout the novel, often during moments of nearly comic social awkwardness, Faye’s youngest son calls her in a state of minor but genuine distress, infusing the narrative with a menace that is both commonplace and disquieting. With uncanny control over Faye’s voice, Cusk amplifies the micro-dramas of everyday interactions, revealing cliffhangers in undercurrents of worry, fear, mirth and excitement. Against the odds, her calm, contemplative plotless novel is a page-turner. Nothing much happens.īut nothing can happen in many ways, and Cusk makes it fascinating.
The dramas are domestic and professional-and hardly dramatic. She runs into an ex-boyfriend, goes on a middling date, accompanies an Albanian tradesman to the hardware store, visits her brother and his new wife, attends a literary festival. Faye, with two young sons in tow, moves back to London, buys a house and hires a contractor to fix it up, angering her neighbours. The brilliance of Transit is in the telling-or, rather, in the re-telling, since Faye tells mostly second-hand stories. As she herself observes, “often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others.” Yet the self-portrait that emerges despite her dodges is fully fleshed. Rarely does she let herself into the spotlight. She’s a first-person narrator who eclipses herself by recounting, in studiously neutral tones, anecdotes she hears from friends, acquaintances and strangers.
Like Outline, Transit is a series of loosely linked chapters reported by Faye, a writer adjusting to life after divorce.
But many will read it with the breathless exhilaration it deserves. Transit won’t thrill everyone: it will enrage those expecting plot, and it may unsettle those expecting a straightforward depiction of family drama and self-discovery. Only one book I read last year rivalled Rachel Cusk’s Transit, the sequel to her 2014 novel Outline.
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