The dissolution of Cusk’s marriage, and the system it represented,
impelled a new sort of writing from the author.
Photograph by Laura Pannack for The New Yorker

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel

After her controversial memoirs of motherhood and marriage, the writer has a new design for fiction.

Judith Thurman
July 3, 2017

In Rachel Cusk’s most recent novels, “Outline” and “Transit,” a British writer named Faye encounters a series of friends and strangers as she goes about her daily life. She is recently divorced, and while her new flat is being renovated her two sons are living with their father. There is something catlike about Faye—an elusiveness that makes people want to detain her, and a curiosity about their pungent secrets. They tell her their histories, and she listens intently. As these soliloquies unspool, a common thread emerges. The speakers suffer from feeling unseen, and in the absence of a reflection they are not real to themselves. Faye shares their dilemma. “It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions,” she says. But she lends herself as a filter to her confidants, and from the murk of their griefs and sorrows, most of which have to do with love, she extracts something clear—a sense of both her own outline and theirs.