Book Report: Transit

23. Rachel Cusk, Transit (2016) (9/1/18)

This is the second book of a trilogy, begun with Outline, which I reviewed here. Like Outline, Transit is narrated by the writer and recent divorcée Faye, whose name (again as in Outline) is uttered but once, near the end; for the most part, she remains rather shadowy, more of a conduit for other people's stories, though in this book we do watch as she settles into a decrepit flat in London with her two boys. The narratives she tells are mesmerizing, hyperintelligent, philosophical, and keenly observed down to the most minute detail.

In this book, Faye, newly returned to London after fifteen years living in the countryside, works with an estate agent to find a flat, bumps into an old boyfriend, gets her hair done, talks with her writing students (Gerard Manley Hopkins and salukis emerge as muses), participates in an event at a literary festival, deals with her contractor and his Albanian and Polish workers, interacts with her troll-like downstairs neighbors, goes on a date, and visits a recently remarried cousin at a small dinner party. We hear the various characters' innermost thoughts, worries, obsessions, and fears. One synopsis says the book is about "childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change," and I suppose that's accurate enough.

I found this book rather unpleasant: many of the characters and situations struck me as simmering in a sort of desperate, fractured violence (the last chapter does, and so that's the feeling the book leaves one with). My memory of Outline is more positive, though I may simply have forgotten the unpleasantness. That said, Cusk's writing is masterful, and I was pulled along by her ability to see well beneath the surface of things. Perhaps life is more desperate, more disorienting, than the usual artistic representations convey, or than we allow ourselves to acknowledge as we seek stability and connection amid the vagaries, losses, confusions, and failures of life. To a certain degree, these stories are as much about the power of fate or circumstance as about any control we may have over our lives.

Here are a few tastes of the inner revelations that Cusk brings to the surface:

When she meets her former boyfriend, Gerald, he tells about how he and his wife met, a story that involves her beloved poodle, whom he loses (apparently for good) in the streets of Toronto.

It was strange, he said, but standing there on the sidewalk with the great grey chasms of Toronto's streets extending away to every side of him and the leash dangling from his hand, he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realised standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there. 

In another chapter, she presents us with Louis, a memoirist on a speaking tour. He describes watching one day out his back French door as his cat, Mino, catches a bird—and then, momentarily distracted by a noise in the road, allows it to escape. Louis is surprised by the bird's resourcefulness, but also recognizes that he could have saved the bird himself by shooing the cat away. But as the story unfolds, he had been deep in thought, considering his unexpected success.

He had . . . bought several new items of furniture with his money, including the Mies van der Rohe chair in which he had at that moment been sitting. He could feel the soft leather beneath his thighs; his nostrils were full of its rich, luxurious smell. These sensations were still quite alien to him, yet he was aware that they were causing a new part of him, a new self, to grow. He had no association with them but those associations were being created right now, while he sat there: he was actively and by small degrees becoming distanced from the person he had been, while becoming by the same small degrees someone new.
 He had wanted to finish these thoughts, to think them to their completion and discover what he truly felt about his change of circumstances: was it self-satisfaction or shame? Was it the vitriolic feeling of having defeated the people who had once belittled and humiliated him, or was it guilt at having escaped them and turned their experiences at their hands to profit while their own lives remained miserably untransformed? These meditations were interrupted by the arrival of Mino in his line of vision and by the story that started playing itself out before his eyes. As he became absorbed in the story—brief though it was—of Mino and the bird, Louis was aware of the feelings of responsibility it was immediately beginning to invoke in him. He watched the bird feebly flap its wings while Mino held it pinned to the earth. Nobody, he realised, was controlling that story: either he needed to act and intervene, or he would be hurt by the sight of Mino killing the bird, because it was of course with the bird that he identified, despite the fact that he knew Mino and that Mino was his cat. . . . Part of him must hate Mino, yet Mino was part of himself. Watching the bird get away, he was reminded of the randomness and cruelty of reality, for which the belief in narrative could only ever provide the most absurd and artificial screen; but greater still was his sense of the bird as symbolising something about truth. Despite his new circumstances, he recalled very well the way he used to be in the world, particularly the way he had played cat, as it were, to his own bird.

It's a long passage, and a bit convoluted, but that epitomizes how Cusk tells her stories—her narratives, weaving together stimuli and responses, being and becoming, negotiations of meaning, control and lack thereof. There's a lot to think about in these pages.

The third book will be out in paperback next April. I believe I'll wait to pick that one up.