Rachel Cusk's Transit - and how it carries on, or doesn't, from Outline

Volume 2 of Rachel Cusk's in-progress trilogy, Transit, doesn't exactly start of where vol 1 (Outline) left off, in that none of the "characters" save the author/narrator is carried over, but the mood and structure is the same: the narrator passes through her life w/ an astonishing facility for eliciting from others their life stories or stories (sometimes fabricated, it would seem) about their lives. As in Outline, the characters who tell their stories in essence paint the background of the canvas, leaving the center of the portrait, Cusk herself (or her narrator, if you will) an opacity. There are some differences and developments, however. In Outline, the narrator was living w/ her 2 sons (she's recently divorced) on the downs on the s. coast of England; Transit begins w/ her relocation to London and in fact her search for housing (hence, the title, at least in the literal sense). Another difference: Outline was very much about the narrator as a writer; it takes place during a week she spends as an instructor in a writing workshop in Athens, and all of the characters she encounters (save one, the "neighbor" she befriends on the plane to Athens) are writers or involved in publishing. Though she self-identifies as a writer in Transit, her occupation doesn't seem central to his narrative, as least through the first third or so. The people she meets are not writers and, in fact, save for an ex-boyfriend she encounters who's an avid musician (amateur perhaps - he's unaccomplished professionally in comparison w/ the narrator), they're not even in the arts: the realtor who directs her to the share in a townhouse she buys, the contractor who comes in to undertake major repairs, her hairdresser (that's kind of a cliched chapter, in my view, as a hairdresser by his profession is going to be telling over and over again his life story - the other encounters are more the result of the narrators capacity to listen to strangers and others; also, the hair salon chapter ends when a young man in an adjacent chair getting his hair cut against his will it seems slams a door on exit shattering a set of glass shelves - who in his right mind would but glass shelving within the swing range of the front door?). No clear theme emerges just yet, but there seems to be a lot of attention to the changing demographics of contemporary London - neighborhoods that once were sketchy are now priced out of sight, for example, which could probably be said, too, of NYC, Paris, many other major cities. The narrator seems caught in squeeze - perhaps having overpaid for a house in deep disrepair. We'll see. 



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