But the wilderness Faye is wandering through at the beginning of the trilogy is particular to her as a writer. The Desert Fathers fled to their cells in the wilderness the Taoists had their dark retreats. Withdrawal from the clamor of human concerns was often prescribed as a spiritual corrective in difficult times.

We are no longer used to the sort of self-effacement Faye practices and yet it is found in the mystic traditions of nearly all religions. I spent the first part of “Outline” waiting for the narrator to emerge from the shadows and the second part wondering what it would mean if she did. There is a startling quality to this reserve in the beginning. She does this by having Faye adopt a stance of radical passivity, listening to the stories of everyone she meets while keeping her own largely untold. This allows her to open it out into a more universal field. We don’t want to believe our houses could burn down too.įrom the beginning, the subtlety and brilliance of Cusk’s project arises from her decision not to foreground Faye’s specific loss. Instead, the novels describe in precise and haunting detail what it’s like to walk through the world, trailing ashes behind you. All three are narrated in the first person by a writer named Faye whose former life has gone up in flames, but they’re not about how or why the fire started. I thought of this as I finished the last book in Rachel Cusk’s masterly trilogy, which began with “Outline” and continued with “Transit” and now “Kudos.” She is the rare contemporary writer who lives up to Baldwin’s credo, but her work doesn’t lend itself to conventional summaries of plot or character. “Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion.”

In 1963, James Baldwin gave a talk entitled “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.” In it, he examined questions of moral and political responsibility, then offered the audience a brief, unnerving explanation of what such integrity means.

Kudos rachel cusk