Rachel Cusk

 

I've written about Rachel Cusk before on the blog, but having recently finished another of her novels -- Kudos -- I wanted to offer some additional commentary. 

Cusk seems to have been located within the contemporary genre of auto-fiction: that space carved out, most notably, by Knausgaard. And to a certain extent, that is right: the thin line between character and self is certainly blurred. 

But I think Cusk has developed her own literary space, too: her narrative style -- which has a primary character recount the story of another, more tangential figure -- is very effective. Often, her way of constructing this sort of narration reads like a novel by Sebald: the central character speaks to the reader about a story involving a second character, whose story is invoked by way of memory, or by way of Cusk's signature "he said" or "she said" construction, which regularly appears in the midst of an extended sentence. 

Like Knausgaard, Cusk takes as her content the banal or the expected, but she has a way of universalizing it: of turning it into something existential, or transnational, or profound. Cusk does this in the most unassuming fashion: she recounts a dialogue between one character and another -- and then, before long, the discussion has assumed a quiet gravity, a sense in which what's being discussed between the characters is actually an exchange between the reader and the ideas being invoked. 

What Kudos is about seems beside the point: it is a novel comprised of a series of discussions, which reveal a range of characters, who are themselves ephemeral. This is a novel about ideas, and the ways we, as people -- as characters -- interact with them. There are not many books like this one, and I heartedly recommend it -- as a fresh angle into what literature can be.