Rachel Cusk

The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2015 In the wake of her family’s collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, and practical—as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life. Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed novel Outline and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change. In this second book of a precise, short, yet epic cycle, Cusk describes the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one’s life, and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.

A Novel

Transit

We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value. What the planets offer, she said, is nothing less than the chance to regain father in the grandeur of the human: how much more dignity and honor, how much kindness and responsibility and respect, would we bring to our dealings with one another if we believed that each and every one of us had a cosmic importance?

I said I wasn't sure: when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn't necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. 

He was like a cupboard rammed full with junk: when he opened the door everything fell out; it took time to reorganize himself. And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. 

She had just broken up with her partner of two years, someone who knew her with sufficient thoroughness that his demolition of her character in their final arguments could not fail to undermine her opinion of herself

I had stood and looked at the painting while my children, who were still small, grew increasingly impatient; I had seemed to see in it a portent whose meaning penetrated me like a skewer in my chest. I could see it, in fact, still, the turbulent whiteness massing and gathering, the wave whose inability to stop itself rising and breaking formed its inescapable destiny. It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist's vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again. But there had been other paintings, I said, before and since, that had moved me just as deeply. 

The concept of justice he had evolved as a result of these experiences was not retributive but the reverse. He had tried to develop his own capacity for forgiveness in order to be free. 

Francis of Assisi, I added, had been disowned by his father, who had even taken him to court to sue him for the material outlay of parenthood, which at that point amounted to little more than the clothes on his back. St. Francis removed them there in court and returned them to him

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