Real Talk: Rachel Cusk's Kudos

Abstract

Real Talk:Rachel Cusk's Kudos Francine Prose (bio) Near the beginning of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov wanders into a seedy tavern, where he is approached by a bloated alcoholic wreck: a former clerk who introduces himself as Marmeladov and asks if they might have a polite conversation. Ignoring Raskolnikov's obvious reluctance, Marmeladov skips the small talk and plunges into a monologue that lasts for pages and pages: a rambling, self-lacerating narrative of abject misfortune, poverty, addiction, guilt, shame, helplessness, sin, weakness, and betrayal. His long-suffering, consumptive wife, whose stockings he has sold to buy drink, has been beaten up by their exasperated landlord. His beloved daughter has become a prostitute to help feed the family. By the end of the novel, the unsolicited confession of this "useless worm" will turn out to be the thing that Raskolnikov most needed to hear, partly because it comes to mirror his own concerns in ways he could not have predicted during their initial meeting in the tavern. The novels in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy — Outline (2015), Transit (2017), and the recently published Kudos — could be [End Page 520] described as a succession of Marmeladov moments. In all three books, the narrator, a writer named Faye, who has two sons and is divorced from their father, encounters people — friends, a former lover, distant acquaintances, and total strangers — who, without much prompting, prove eager to tell her their secrets, to uninhibitedly and eloquently recount the most disruptive, wounding, and shameful events in their lives. Their stories are rarely as brutal as the Russian clerk's account of seeing his daughter forced to wear the insignia of an official prostitute, but there's plenty of malice, threat, deception, heartbreak, and damage. People make terrible decisions for reasons they barely understand. They lie, and proceed to distort their existence, to avoid admitting that everything about them is pretense. They treat their spouses or lovers very badly, or are treated even worse. Women suffer at the hands of manipulative and vindictive men. Children are benignly ignored, abused, misunderstood, or at least resented. Death matches over real estate transpire in gentrifying urban neighborhoods. Petty jealousies escalate into irreparable estrangements. As Faye hears these stories, the novels create a kind of liminal space, one we all experience when strangers tell us stories, where the point of view belongs to neither the teller nor the listener. It's not so much that Faye's a cipher; more accurately, the stories she hears are more like an environment in which she dwells, her novelist's natural habitat — the very air she breathes or water in which she swims. Faye travels frequently, mostly for reasons connected with her career. She attends literary festivals and teaches writing classes. She renovates a home in London, dealing simultaneously with a helpful contractor and the loutish, resentful downstairs neighbors who seem bent on making her life hell. She debates the merits of coloring her hair, meets friends for dinner, goes on a date, and attempts to promote her books. [End Page 521] Her sons, who stay with their father when Faye is away or when the new home is being refurbished, phone her at the most inconvenient moments, usually when they are involved in the sort of crises (scared, lonely, lost on the street, having attended a party that culminated in accidental arson) that might send a more impulsive mother on the first plane home. Faye takes her sons' calls, even when she's teaching or in the midst of an intense conversation, and though in one case her son must remind her to focus, she manages to stay calm enough to help them sort things out. In some ways Faye is living an unremarkable life, doing what writers and mothers do, though the acutely attentive and analytical cast of her intellect means that she is rarely operating on the autopilot which permits the rest of us to insulate and protect ourselves. As her mind tracks from the mundane to the philosophical, from casual remarks to deeper reflections on life and how it should be lived, Faye is always, as it were, on high alert. This is partly, we come to feel...