Review of Transit: A Novel, by Rachel Cusk

Transit by Rachel Cusk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


British writer Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit reads like a nest of short stories, webbed together against the backdrop of a writer and mother’s episodes of encounter and transformation in the wake of her divorce. Along with the writer, we meet various characters as mundane as a contractor who renovates her new house in London, a former lover she meets by chance on the street, two fellow writers at a symposium, and the hair stylist who colors her hair. While seemingly mundane, these episodes include portentous moments that suggest they are more than they seem. Each interaction becomes a lens for viewing elemental life questions about good and evil, will and fate, engagement and ennui. One underlying question is whether the writer can apprehend the reality of life sufficiently to love, to parent, and to write. While the book is highly analytical, moments of pure experience rip through the cerebral, as in this unexpected embrace from a man she has just met: “He put his warm, thick tongue in my mouth; he thrust his hands inside my coat. His lean, hard body was more insistent than forceful” (126).
Cusk’s style, at times simple, is alternately as elevated and portentous as the writing of W.G. Sebald. Describing the drive to a party at her cousin’s house, for example, she writes: “the journey followed a series of narrow, circuitous roads that never seemed to pass through any settlement but wound lengthily through dark countryside shrouded in thick fog….The submerged shapes of trees showed faintly along the roadside like objects imprisoned in ice” (211). The persons gathered at the house party are described with a similar sense of strangeness—and it is no accident that this episode marks the end of the book. By the conclusion of the visit, the writer is convinced that she “felt change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things…” (260). Along with the narrator, the reader, too, is led to moments of insight and transformation in transit through the chapters of this book.




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