Jessica Swoboda at Commonweal:
Reading a Rachel Cusk novel is like watching a recording of your everyday life, with all your subtly unflattering habits, traits, and actions. A conversation with your seatmate on a plane reveals that you manipulate your family like items on an Excel sheet. A lunch meeting about a potential business partnership discloses that people only matter to you if you profit from them. No one at your get-together of acquaintances reacts when a woman admits she abuses her dog.
These are references to scenes from Cusk’s acclaimed Outline trilogy (2014–18), novels driven by a series of exchanges that Faye, the mostly mute narrator, has with those she encounters. Her conversations read more like monologues, the characters talking at her like she’s on a bad date. These quasi-vignettes replace a traditional narrative arc. The characters don’t have rich inner lives, and they’re largely indistinguishable, different only in the ways that their greed, narcissism, and self-centeredness manifest. As a narrator, Faye is deadpan, sometimes even cruel; she allows no wrongdoing, misstep, or embarrassment to go unnoticed
more here.
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