Rachel Cusk's Kudos
In the first of the many conversations that makes up Rachel Cusk’s Kudos, the narrator is asked what kind of books she writes and replies that it’s hard to explain. Critics have struggled with classifying Cusk’s series of enigmatic works—this is the final one—centred around the consciousness of a narrator who, much like Cusk herself, is a well-regarded author making the literary circuit of book festivals and writers’ courses, and only occasionally supplying details about her life. Mostly, she listens. The people she meets are exceptionally keen to tell her about themselves, justifying and defending their choices in how to live, sharing their puzzlement about family and career disappointments. These conversations take place in settings conducive to instant intimacy, but more importantly the narrator is—without ever acknowledging this about herself—drawing them out, observing them, with a calm curiosity that is not quite empathy. People interest her, and her own reactions to them are also treated with a distancing level of dispassionate observation.
Cusk has written more conventional novels--Saving Agnes, The Country Life—and she has written autobiographically, most famously in her trenchant account of motherhood, A Life’s Work.
It cannot be easy to be the subject of her appraising gaze ( some recent profiles include disquieting accounts of her estrangement from her parents; her essay about their silences, "Coventry," is illuminating). And in these books there is some attempt to protect her intimates: the narrator writes of a son, not of the daughters that Cusk herself has, yet this seems like such a transparent shift, fooling no one, that I am reminding myself that just because the narrator’s personal anecdotes have the feeling of autobiographical reminiscence does not mean that they are—just that Cusk is very very good at what she is doing here.
But what is she doing?
First, I think, she is illustrating the necessary but rather terrible egotism of individual selfhood. As in the vanitas paintings of flesh and fruit portrayed as vulnerable to decay, depicted as substitutes for human life, Cusk’s word sketches—the summaries of people’s stories with lightly inserted but crucial commentaries—point to the diverse but ultimately futile strategies we deploy to fight despair about mortality, gestures of self-assertion occasionally revealed or acknowledged as futile. What we choose to do both matters very little, given the eventual outcome, and makes all the difference. Do we live fiercely and bravely, or cower? Are we kind or cruel? Do we stay or do we go?
In this volume, this last is the key question, prompted by the Brexit debates, which, in Cusk’s hands, are alluded to without being quite named.
Each of the people the narrator meets (and this seems especially case with the male characters who vaunt their career successes while ultimately owning up to great personal disillusionment) wants to control the telling of their own story. And yet, each fails, identifying ruefully—or having the narrator’s observing eye supply the critique—how they fall short of the illusion the individual aimed to project.
But then she’s also demonstrating how fascinating it is that we are this way: hopeful of attention and regard, needy of affection. It’s desperate and necessary. There’s a verb that turns up in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature—“to compassionate”—that seems appropriate here: Cusk, via her narrator, is in sympathy with the project of crafting a human life as an exercise in storytelling.
[And a caveat, likely irrelevant: in what possible way is Rachel Cusk a Canadian writer, except by accident of birth? I drafted this review when I read an advance e-copy of the novel, courtesy of the publisher and Netgalley, and then I hesitated. It was clear that the reviews and, yes, kudos would pour in; Cusk is a kind of writer’s writer who also has a high level of visibility. And I was in a bit of a snit, on behalf of Canadian writers, because Cusk occasionally scoops up CanLit awards and yet is largely absent on the Canadian literary landscape: not teaching here, or setting books here, or living here. I’m being parochial, but I want to push back against the idea that birthplace is all-determining. Then again, who was it who said Canada was in desperate enough need of writers to claim as our own that stopping off for a sandwich at the Regina airport qualified?]
Cusk has written more conventional novels--Saving Agnes, The Country Life—and she has written autobiographically, most famously in her trenchant account of motherhood, A Life’s Work.
It cannot be easy to be the subject of her appraising gaze ( some recent profiles include disquieting accounts of her estrangement from her parents; her essay about their silences, "Coventry," is illuminating). And in these books there is some attempt to protect her intimates: the narrator writes of a son, not of the daughters that Cusk herself has, yet this seems like such a transparent shift, fooling no one, that I am reminding myself that just because the narrator’s personal anecdotes have the feeling of autobiographical reminiscence does not mean that they are—just that Cusk is very very good at what she is doing here.
But what is she doing?
First, I think, she is illustrating the necessary but rather terrible egotism of individual selfhood. As in the vanitas paintings of flesh and fruit portrayed as vulnerable to decay, depicted as substitutes for human life, Cusk’s word sketches—the summaries of people’s stories with lightly inserted but crucial commentaries—point to the diverse but ultimately futile strategies we deploy to fight despair about mortality, gestures of self-assertion occasionally revealed or acknowledged as futile. What we choose to do both matters very little, given the eventual outcome, and makes all the difference. Do we live fiercely and bravely, or cower? Are we kind or cruel? Do we stay or do we go?
In this volume, this last is the key question, prompted by the Brexit debates, which, in Cusk’s hands, are alluded to without being quite named.
Each of the people the narrator meets (and this seems especially case with the male characters who vaunt their career successes while ultimately owning up to great personal disillusionment) wants to control the telling of their own story. And yet, each fails, identifying ruefully—or having the narrator’s observing eye supply the critique—how they fall short of the illusion the individual aimed to project.
But then she’s also demonstrating how fascinating it is that we are this way: hopeful of attention and regard, needy of affection. It’s desperate and necessary. There’s a verb that turns up in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature—“to compassionate”—that seems appropriate here: Cusk, via her narrator, is in sympathy with the project of crafting a human life as an exercise in storytelling.
[And a caveat, likely irrelevant: in what possible way is Rachel Cusk a Canadian writer, except by accident of birth? I drafted this review when I read an advance e-copy of the novel, courtesy of the publisher and Netgalley, and then I hesitated. It was clear that the reviews and, yes, kudos would pour in; Cusk is a kind of writer’s writer who also has a high level of visibility. And I was in a bit of a snit, on behalf of Canadian writers, because Cusk occasionally scoops up CanLit awards and yet is largely absent on the Canadian literary landscape: not teaching here, or setting books here, or living here. I’m being parochial, but I want to push back against the idea that birthplace is all-determining. Then again, who was it who said Canada was in desperate enough need of writers to claim as our own that stopping off for a sandwich at the Regina airport qualified?]