Transit

Almost exactly two years ago, I was writing my review of Cusk's last novel, Outline, which turned out to be one of the best books I read that year. I think Transit, the second in a proposed trilogy about a fictional author who gets divorced, is even better, but that may be the result of reading her divorce memoir, Aftermath, immediately beforehand. A suitor in Aftermath tells her, "Sometimes you say things before you've understood them yourself. For you the saying is a kind of working out ... like doing a sum on a bit of paper," and that applies to her memoirs, which are cantankerous, blurty performances. Her novels, though, are high-wire acts without a single wobble. In Outline we glimpsed Faye through her retellings of the stories people told her on a teaching trip to Greece. In Transit she is back home in London, where relatives, colleagues, and past and future boyfriends tell stories that are quietly compelling on their own, although the real action occurs in Faye's attempts to find meaning in them. It is in this intimate communing with her mind's inner workings that we come to know her, so that when Cusk adds just a few physical details—a coat worn inside, a blush—her creation emerges dazzlingly into life.