But, with Kudos, such a near-perfect piece of art, it's as if Cusk is saying want a lesson in the viability of literature? Just look at this book you're reading right now, this is how it's done. Cusk is clearly saddened by the declining status of literary fiction, 'our instinct for beauty', blunted by the low-brow machinery of market realities. The milieu of this world is critics, editors, publishers, mediocre self-promoters. The smug New York Times bestseller, successful only off the back of one of his students, who pontificates endlessly about his Fitbit, explaining she couldn't possibly contribute to his autism anthology, 'since the whole point of it was to make money, and as I say, we needed the big names for that'. There's the morose novelist who has won every award going for his profound empathy. Journalists come to interview her and spend the entire time talking about themselves.

The food is 'made of fish', the accommodation bleak. If anything, she is even more of an invisible observer.įaye is in Germany and Portugal, for a literary festival and conference. Any expectation, though, she might become more embodied would be to breach the incredibly rigid form Cusk has worked so hard to set up. Transit in 2016 saw Faye back in London renovating a home, rebuilding a life, and giving us observations of middle-class conformity so sharp they threatened to break the pages with their brittleness. Instead, she has, 'come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unremarked by self-will as possible'.Ĭusk's radical portrayal of Faye, as absent or invisible, just an outline, an empty shape who gives nothing away, had most reviewers gushing that she had 'reinvented' the novel. The first rule of such a class might be that characters must always 'want' something, but the divorced Faye, has lost faith in stories.

In 2014's Outline, Faye goes to Greece to teach a two-day creative-writing class. Like Rachel Cusk, her heroine Faye is a divorced writer with two children.

Kudos rachel cusk