You can hear a lot by just listening: Rachel Cusk's narrartive

Some of this may be repeating thoughts I had at the end of volume 1 (Outline) or Rachel Cusk's in-progress trilogy, but it seems to me, having finished volume 2 (Transit) that she has succeeded, at least in part, by turning conventional ideas about narrative inside out. That is, the primary lesson in all writing classes, programs, and manuals re fiction writing is "show, don't tell" - that is, the author or narrator creates scenes involving action, conflict, insight, characters, change in order to convey the essence of the novel, the story line. Cusk has built to date 2 novels that are almost entirely "told": we rarely (some of the boat scenes in volume one and a few moments of conflict with the downstairs neighbors in Transit) have a scene of action and conflict; rather, Cusk has created a narrator who is expert as eliciting stories from others, so in virtually every chapter the narrator (Faye, though she seems a lot of Cusk from what I know) meets someone - sometimes an old friend, sometimes a stranger, sometimes a passing acquaintance such as a construction worker on the job at her house - and hears from them the story of their lives or, most often, of their disintegrated marriage(s). Part of her point, I think, is to have a narrator completely opaque and a world view of narratives in which people are deracinated - separated from their homeland, or their children, or spouse, by economic forces (need to earn a living) and psychological forces (inability to carry on a successful long-term relationship) - and in which the narrator is literally defined by her absences. There are hints that she has a sex life and she is obviously attractive to # of men, but she reveals nothing about her thoughts, feelings, fears - and only occasionally about her ideas. Others do all the talking. Well, as Yogi Berra said allegedly: You can hear a lot by just listening. But is that enough? I feel a little frustrated by the end of Transit - as I think a novel, and even more so a trilogy, needs a sense of direction, an arc so to speak. Cusk intentionally avoids that in that characters aside from the narrator rarely make more than one appearance (at least in Transit) and there are no carry-over characters from Outline. The novel ends with a dinner party that involves lots of conflict among the guests and between the guests and some of the children, who have been invited along - but the thing is that we care little about them becuase they are new to the novel at this point, so when the scene ends with the narrator packing up in the a.m. (everyone spent the night and all are asleep) and heading home (to London), it doesn't really make any great statement except that she woke up and is ready to more on (see the title). Cusk has found shaky ground between in novel, in which characters evolve and develop, and a collection of short stories, in which the link is the consciousness of the writer but not necessarily a continuity among characters or settings. Here we have neither - the chapters don't fully stand alone as stories, but they don't connect or interact w/ one another either.

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