Rachel Cusk’s three connected novels – Outline (2015), Transit (2017), and Kudos (2018) – were my summer vacation reading this year.  I had read Outline when it was first published but decided to re-read it to get a proper grasp of the entire trilogy.  The novels have been acclaimed widely and I was keen to understand why because my first experience of reading Outline hadn’t been especially enthralling at the time.

The novels have very little in the way of a conventional plot. They all feature a single narrator, a published writer called Faye.  We don’t learn much about Faye’s basic biography.  We know she’s divorced, has children, and has moved back to London from the countryside.  We know she teaches creative writing and attends literary conferences. In all three novels we follow her through a series of apparently disconnected encounters and conversations: with students, fellow writers, a festival organizer, a former boyfriend, a builder renovating her apartment, and so on.  Our picture of Faye grows in increments through these encounters.

Although I’m very glad to have read all three novels and was very impressed by them, they probably weren’t ideal vacation reading (at least for me). These are demanding, sinewy books; cerebral, chilly, and difficult to penetrate. Cusk has serious ambitions for these novels, nothing less than how to live today and how to interact with others. Something necessarily difficult and complicated is at work here, something that demands effort, persistence, and patience – much like life itself.