His struggle for freedom is a figure for male pain. He is extremely tall and cannot keep his limbs out of the gangway of an airplane. The first person in Kudos is a man, a total stranger. The speakers form concentric circles around Faye, each leading closer to the core, like the canals of Amsterdam or the circles of hell. Faye does not parse this speech she just reports. Some of the dialogue is in quotation marks, but most is rendered as indirect speech (“It was true that a hamster meant nothing to her, she said, since they had a no-pets policy in their building…”). There are no pauses, few adverbs, and, most notably, few interjections by Faye. These conversations do not read like natural speech. Is it narrative? A greater sense of justice? Or simple delusion? Into the empty space of Faye Kudos pours its ideas. In Kudos, Cusk asks what holds a life together.

The novels consist of a series of one-sided conversations: Faye meets people who deliver what are essentially monologues about themselves, each presenting a miniature treatise on the self, the family, memory, the nature of truth, and marriage.

She has suffered some unnamed trauma that annihilated the life she lived previously, and from the outset presents herself as a kind of void. Kudos is the final novel in a trilogy by Rachel Cusk that includes Outline (2014) and Transit (2017).

Rachel cusk kudos review