RaveSlate\"Kudos, reaches a kind of formal perfection. Rarely does a single word of its exceptionally polished prose seem out of place. What’s more, the driving philosophical concerns of the novel are, to put it in a single word, real: The questions are real, and there really are no obvious answers ... this tension—between Faye as the passive protagonist on one hand, and the selective and discriminating narrator on the other—might be the chief animating force of the trilogy ... The struggle a reader undergoes when reading these books, then, is just a miniature version of the struggle we undergo by living: We want to attach significance to the way events unfold, but we also know on some level that to do so is delusional ... The novel seems a form particularly ill-suited to make the point that narrative itself is merely self-deception. Anyone who really believed that would put the book down there and then—or stop writing it. Instead, Cusk has triumphed in the completion of this masterly trilogy; the reader must continue guessing at meaning, improvising and reworking it as the story unfolds ... the values of these novels are ultimately bourgeois values. Cusk approaches the philosophical questions of the books with what you might call bourgeois vocabulary— religious, literary, and psychological, rather than political or economic.\
Sheila Heti
PositiveLondon Review of BooksThe book looks like a novel. It is arranged in short fragments, which incorporate dialogue, but it doesn’t tell a story as such. Its progress often feels more cyclical than linear ... Heti and her narrator inhabit, if not the same person, at least the same reality. This process injects an element of chance into the narrative, which Heti corrals in service of the book’s philosophical inquiry ... In Motherhood, Heti continues the project of How Should a Person Be? in at least one way: by opening out seemingly individual experiences into a general inquiry about ways of being. Despite its cyclical form, Motherhood is not so much a document of uncertainty and indecision as of the narrator’s slow and halting decision to live without children ... part of the point Heti is making is that not having babies can be interesting too; that living eternity backwards through one’s ancestors could be just as fulfilling as living it forwards through one’s children ... The moral conundrum involved in the decision to create a new life can’t be resolved in the space of a novel – but Motherhood gives it sustained and serious attention.
