Divorced and making a new start in London, a creative writing teacher is immersed in the lives of others in this radically inventive novel Rachel Cusk’s new novel is tremendous from its opening sentence. “An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future.” How inspired and witty, to begin with a spam email – and carrying a message that sounds as momentous as if it might have come from the oracle at Delphi. The “movements of the planets” represent “a zone of infinite reverberation to human destiny”; the portentousness is absurd, and stirring. The email is obviously generated by a mere algorithm, as the narrator grasps at once; she isn’t fooled. And yet, because it’s positioned there at the very entrance to the novel, we also know that the prophecy speaks to her sensibility, it really does open up the future for her. Messages from Delphi, after all, were pretty generalised, as if they were generated randomly. Cusk is always an exciting writer: striking and challenging, with a distinctive cool prose voice, and behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force, even rash. One never feels her writing is trying to be liked, and in the past her memoirs of motherhood and of divorce have been both loved and hated by her readers, because of what’s abrasive and singular in them. In her last novel, _Outline_, about a woman teaching creative writing in Greece, and now in _Transit_, where the same woman, Faye, is back in London, making a new life for herself after a separation from her husband, she has developed a radically new novel form that works triumphantly, I think, with just what’s distinctive in her writing personality. Continue reading...
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