It’s only January, but I doubt that I’ll read a better novel this year than Rachel Cusk’s Transit. Cusk writes in a cut-glass style that is elegant, austere, and disciplined — an important word in a novel about gaining control over the self and fate. Yet this cool, balanced style is used to describe the hottest of feelings and the most destabilizing of experiences ... Faye is more of a presence in this novel than in the last. She’s still an outline, but she’s a clearer one ... At this midpoint in Cusk’s series, Faye remains in transit. But under the beautifully composed surface, the plates of Faye’s self are shifting.
...tremendous from its opening sentence ... Cusk is always an exciting writer: striking and challenging, with a distinctive cool prose voice, and behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force, even rash ... This way of sequencing narrative feels like an elegant formal solution to the problem of the sheer force of personality in Cusk’s writing. It’s a striking gesture of relinquishment. Faye’s story contends for space against all these others, and the novel’s meaning is devolved out from its centre in her to a succession of characters ... The novel’s language is spare and vivid and exact, never inflated. There’s no exaggerated effort to imitate the accents or voices of the various storytellers, and yet the prose is scrupulously attentive to the gritty detail in what they tell ... All too often there is a trade-off between formal experiments in literature and reading pleasure, but the joy of Transit is that it’s so eminently readable.
Rachel Cusk’s project appears to be nothing less than the reinvention of the form itself ... It is a risky business, this summing up. Show, don’t tell, say the creative writing manuals. Cusk has torn up the rule book, and in the process created a work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality ... Cusk’s novel appears to chime with the Nietzschean concept of self as a continuous process of becoming ... Where other novelists have looked 'deep within,' Cusk seeks to rise above the 'I.' In doing so, she has created from Faye’s 'absence' a palpable, recognizable presence, and constructed a meditation on the nature of self, freedom, narrative and reality. Best of all, she has given us all this in a novel that is compulsively readable.
As a structure, this is as old as Chaucer, but it feels, for this generation, very new. At a time when many literary bestsellers are introspective and self-focused, Cusk has created a novel in which every chapter begins with other people. The narrator reduces herself to a vehicle for others’ stories. There’s a daring in this method congruent with its modesty ... This would be vague or allegorical, if Cusk weren’t so perfectly specific ... the language of these stories is not quite plausible. Cusk’s characters are characters, but also symbols and philosophical propositions. The dialogue is not so much dialogue as Socratic questioning. This is the fantasy of a life lived without small talk, all the fat cut away. But Cusk’s goal isn’t plausibility so much as the establishment of a compelling, dreamlike language and worldview that are utterly her own.
...[a] transfixing new novel ... These two short books are part of a projected trilogy, and together they’re already a serious achievement: dense, aphoristic, philosophically acute novels that read like Iris Murdoch thrice distilled. Increasingly, I’m more interested in getting my hands on the final installment in Ms. Cusk’s series than I am the last of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle books. Ms. Cusk is perhaps more profitably compared to writers like J. M. Coetzee and Mr. Roth himself. Her writing offers the iron-rich pleasures of voice instead of style. Each sentence is drilled down, as with an auger ... Transit is fat with substance, as August Wilson once said he wanted his plays to be. There’s a lot of humor in its talk ... Faye occasionally makes the kind of oracular pronouncements that make you want to ask the waiter for the check, please. Such moments are few, but there are more than in the last book, and it’s a worrisome trend.
Cusk gives us engrossing, probing conversations between her narrator — a writer named Faye unmoored by the breakup of her marriage — and various people she encounters as she goes about her business in her bewildered, post-parted state ... Because the books are more episodic than plotted, they're fine when read individually. But even though they feel unstructured, they're carefully choreographed — and taken together, they trace Faye's subtle, gradual passage from shaky bewilderment to more solid ground ... While Cusk's unorthodox narrative is slyly indirect, her prose is exquisitely precise.
Cusk pulls off a rare feat: richly philosophical fiction—addressing nothing less ambitious than how to live in relationships with others—in which ideas are so successfully and naturally embedded in the quotidian that the reader can choose whether or not to acknowledge them. Outline and Transit are being hailed as masterpieces, not without cause; if anything, the new book is even stronger than its predecessor. Cusk has long been one of the finest and most invigorating stylists writing in English, graced with scientific precision, meticulous syntax, and a viperous wit. I take enormous pleasure in her sentences.
Transit is, again, a novel of anecdotes—confided by friends and colleagues, by men hoping to seduce Faye, by the workers, the realtor and even the hairdresser ... just what she—and by extension the reader—is learning from these conversations is less evident ... tension is uncomfortably ubiquitous in Transit, which faithfully captures the feelings of agitation and powerlessness that come with change. But these are not especially edifying feelings to develop, and as a stand-alone novel Transit is a puzzling spectacle of tetchy behavior ... Transit is a frustrating, fractious experience, but it should be a step toward a unique and rewarding whole.
Transit continues a fascinating experiment. But as in Outline, its title also states an intention: Transit wants to be Cusk’s Purgatorio, her account of a character’s growth, crossing, and metamorphosis. That’s where the novel, wonderful and moving as it is, falls short ... These tantalizing pieces appear to fit together. They give the book artistic cohesion even as the precise argument hovers just out of reach ... It is a lovely ars poetica. The problem is: Transit’s forms don’t quite match its themes as perfectly as Outline’s did.
What could be excruciating navel-gazing by a cast of mostly upper-middle class white Brits is instead a revealing, gently sardonic glimpse into the emotional lives of intelligent, articulate, yet stultified adults ... Cusk writes with the same pitiless, probing eye, the same transcendent, perfectly controlled prose as these Great Male Narcissists, but from a feminine viewpoint that is not fatally weakened by a fear of women. While the penis-gazers relegate the other half of humanity to mere symbolic vessels of their desire and convenient foils to their own weaknesses, Cusk has no such blind spots, and therefore casts a clearer and bolder eye upon the world ... Cusk, like fellow European feminist Elena Ferrante, has broken the bondage of the male point of view, but whereas Ferrante is a bare-knuckle brawler, Cusk takes a less confrontational, more bloodless approach. Which is not to say that her prose is devoid of passion, for Cusk’s 'native habit of finding metaphors and similes in unlikely places' makes her writing pulse with relevance and meaning, while changing the paradigm of literature.
Increasingly, Faye’s brevity and reticence come to resemble a form of intimacy between her and the reader ... How much should we say, this novel asks, and when should we say it? To whom? In Cusk’s case, a few words are enough to keep readers engrossed, waiting for more.
If this sounds like a recipe for sleep soup, rest assured: It is anything but. This is because everything in the novel is filtered through Faye, and Faye is as funny and moving and ruthlessly articulate as she is good at paying attention ... A concomitant desire to understand or at least illuminate the mechanisms and limits of freedom moves insistently through the pages of Transit ... It is hard to have to wait for Cusk’s next novel to see where Faye’s listening, and readouts of it will take her, and us, next.
Reading British author Rachel Cusk is like following a trail of tiny diamond chips, then stepping back to discover the trail has expanded into a vast, glittering mosaic ... It’s part of Cusk’s spell. The reader drops instantly, with her first words and sentences, into a strange, cold trance — unable to look away yet uneasy, discomfited, off-balance ... Faye’s role in each discussion resembles a therapist’s: She remains nearly silent, offering only an occasional word or phrase. These silences work like a velvet setting, showcasing details. A reader finds herself sinking gladly into Sebaldian particulars that open out and stand for much more ... Cusk’s writing is always precise, supple, complexly beautiful: Hers is surely one of the most acute minds alive today. My only reservation about these mesmerizing interviews — a brilliant portrait gallery — is that, watching a sensibility teetering at the edge of the world in part horror, part wonder and part paralysis, one longs for Faye to swipe aside the miasma or at least call its bluff; take hard action, re-enter, believe.
Time invested in Rachel Cusk’s work is never ill spent. There is so much to luxuriate in. Her sentences are like artfully laid little paths in a beautiful bit of woods ... The world is big and confusing, and we find ourselves wanting guidance. Some people like to find it in churches; others like to find it in fiction. But Cusk is one of those novelists — and they abound right now, from Ben Lerner to Sheila Heti — who are looking to trouble that relationship ... Does all this blabbing sound a bit tedious? I fear that it does; I fear that this sort of book has nothing to say to vast swaths of humanity...sometimes, as I read Transit, I had questions about whether or not any of this was really improving fiction in the way that the intellectual justification seems to imply. One does not get the impression, for example, that what Cusk is actually importing into the novel is unadulterated experience ... Though mostly a vessel for other people’s stories in Outline and Transit, there is a certain elegance to the existence this narrator has. She does not seem to fear anything. She does not seem to want anything. And above all, she never seems uncertain about who she is or what she’s doing.
The characters in Rachel Cusk’s Transit—like those in her novel Outline—appear from out of the ether, open their chest to bare an eloquent heart, then disappear into the fictional universe, often never to be seen or heard from again ... Unlike much first-person literary fiction, which prizes above all else the psychological shifts of the protagonist, we have no idea, most of the time, what Faye thinks about anyone. It is as if she is being constantly assaulted by the lives of other people ... Cusk models a fascinating alternative to the interior voice: and one that, like the best works of fiction, will produce a jolt of recognition. We are each the inscrutable black hole at the center of our own galaxy: mysterious, stolid, and, like it or not, encircled by a swirling chatter of stars.
Cusk weaves her narrative through stories that build upon other stories with no regard for transition or excessive internal narration. There’s nothing more steady than change in this slim, steely novel. No room for sentimentality, yet violence lurks beneath the surface ... Faye rarely reveals much about herself, but her vulnerability is never hidden. In its subtle way, Transit brilliantly empowers its readers to live and write boldly, aware of consequence, but with one eye always on the open road ahead.
It isn't necessary to read Outline to appreciate Transit — there isn't much to know in terms of plot — but many who pick up Transit first will likely find themselves seeking out Outline for another hit of Cusk's bracing wisdom, clever sentences and droll humor ... Plot-driven novels dominate the current American book scene — even literary fiction is rarely allowed to drift and meander as it once did, if the author hopes to find a publisher. Transit is a refreshing reminder that there's another way of working.
She is ever present, and yet not present at all, seemingly unmoved by everything. Both Cusk’s prose and Faye’s character are a study in subtlety and control ... Transit makes no apologies for this limited view of the world. And why should it, in its experimental bluntness and forthrightness. The prose blends cool, pared-back observations with beautifully textured sentences ... At the heart of Transit is the idea that we long to feel real, and to be seen, particularly as we age. Cusk treats the themes of invisibility, aging, and womanhood with acute precision by allotting them absence and silence. Faye, shadowy and hardly seen by others, offers a portrait of a state shared by other women ... It is an important and transformative book, both because of the social and political questions it raises about gender and the exploration of truth as a lie within the walls of fiction.
If this sounds slight, it is. The story serves only to bring the narrator into contact with other characters, all of whom have a story to tell, related in chunks of dialog and third-person exposition. The effect of these stories, essentially novelized dramatic monologues, is both interesting and tiresome. There is interest in what they replace, the silence they fill, as the narrator’s reticence communicates a traumatic past that is finally — though incompletely — revealed by novel’s end. There is also a voyeuristic interest in hearing these voices speak ... But just as that chattering voice behind you can become dull, even maddening, so it sometimes is here with these reported anecdotes. Though Cusk has a good feel for how long to linger before moving on to the next talkative stranger, the book is necessarily hemmed in by its own rules.
All these tales have a stranger-than-fiction twist to them. They also, while grounded in humble quotidian details, lead to larger questions concerning freedom and fate, appearance and reality, choice and passivity. This sounds a bit solemn, but plenty of dry humor spices the book ... Cusk’s story-invention powers are so rich that the format feels as fresh the second time around as it did the first. It also hints at Cusk’s extraordinarily precise orchestration of narrative effects.
She is ever present, and yet not present at all, seemingly unmoved by everything. Both Cusk’s prose and Faye’s character are a study in subtlety and control ... Transit makes no apologies for this limited view of the world. And why should it, in its experimental bluntness and forthrightness. The prose blends cool, pared-back observations with beautifully textured sentences ... At the heart of Transit is the idea that we long to feel real, and to be seen, particularly as we age. Cusk treats the themes of invisibility, aging, and womanhood with acute precision by allotting them absence and silence. Faye, shadowy and hardly seen by others, offers a portrait of a state shared by other women.
