In Rachel Cusk's novel Kudos, there's no plot. A writer travels by plane to a literary event. People, mostly strangers, speak to her (or at her) in lengthy unbidden self-revelations and philosophical disquisitions at every point in her journey. No innocuous chitchat. No polite silence. Nightmarish.
Endless one-sided exchanges aren't necessarily boring but they're always fatiguing, I've found. A boss, a store clerk, a man on the train have all earned my awe and irritation, talking for twenty, thirty minutes without permitting me to contribute a complete sentence or make for the exit. Since the narrator of the novel is mostly absent, the risible effect of longwindedness is transferred to the page, intentionally or not. So it's perfectly natural to respond inwardly with jokes and fantasies of rudeness while reading it: massive sighs, dark mutterings, fatal leaps from the nearest window, that sort of thing. Only one character has the courtesy to acknowledge that he might be talking her ear off.
In other words, the concept of the book, at least, is tempting to spoof. However, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it on those grounds, as a journalist who is supposed to interview the narrator does when he meets her at a dinner. He looks forward to speaking to her, he says, because he can ask her one question and let her write the rest of the interview with her reply. Perhaps Cusk allows that his ambush is clever. Yet it's also cheap and probably a sign of laziness too: He's apparently made no effort to consider whether the people in her books actually have something to say. If Kudos is any indication, they clearly do.
Cusk's iciness is of a familiar kind. She closely analyzes physical appearance and is often unflattering. She doesn't let the odd gesture or posture or facial expression go unnoticed. She evinces little or no affection. One gets the sense at times that she's in the habit of rendering a final verdict on someone at a glance. Clinical lucidity, bordering on uncharitable. Most writing like this sounds interchangeable, gray and suffocating. I put down The Bradshaw Variations for that reason. But in Kudos, Cusk mitigates it to an extent with a surprising sense of humor and an eye for the absurd. The book begins with a good simple comic situation: a giant man struggling to position himself properly in a little airplane seat. Sometimes she's dryly amusing. Sometimes she's openly, humorously scornful. And, as mentioned before, she even includes a mean witticism at her expense.
In any case, the narrator's presence is minimized as the people she meets take turns at center stage. The variety elevates the book, though not as much as it could, since I don't think the individual voices are fully realized - too scripted, too polished in language and rhythm to ring true as common, improvised speech. But it does work as a gallery of different perspectives on the self, appearances, relations between men and women, literary culture, and other subjects. Part of the difficulty for the reader lies in how frequently they go unchallenged. One woman examines the worst of herself, comes to questionable conclusions, and somehow goes no further. And the listener, obviously perceptive, nevertheless doesn't rouse her in any way before moving on to the next one. And the next one. There are stretches in which the countervailing forces of moderation and doubt are nowhere to be seen. Shaky arguments abound. It's annoying. This is no accident.
Not that it's necessary but other people are more companionable. And the narrator does finally speak at length. Her words, suggesting a kind of personal ceasefire, are among the most measured and, therefore, refreshing. Directly confronted with an ugliness hinted at by several women along the way, she isn't indifferent. She's unfazed.
It is the last book of a trilogy, all in a similar style. I'm not sure if I'll check out the others. Cusk has come to abhor fiction. But instead of writing another autobiography, for which she's received much censure, she wrote these. Kudos does not strike me as anything other than fiction. Harold Bloom: "Realism isn't even realistic." Particularly so in this novel. I haven't encountered anyone who can convince me it is a masterpiece, though there seem to be many who've deemed it so, even while identifying many of the same flaws I have. It isn't a masterpiece. It isn't a near-masterpiece. It's an uneven but intriguing experiment in avoiding the trap of narcissism that makes autofiction an inherently dubious way forward.
