Kudos

Kudos by Rachel Cusk is a satisfying ending to her Outline Trilogy. I don't mean "satisfying" in any moral sense--if anything, it ends with one of the most hopeless images I can imagine. I mean that Kudos maintains the sheer nerve of her whole vision, which is to create a series of novels in which the narrator reveals almost nothing about herself and yet, somehow, thoroughly explores the unspeakable. In a broad sense, the series is about a woman coming out of a brutal divorce. We learn this only through the ways that others speak to her, as each novel is a stream of one-sided conversations from everyone she encounters. On any further examination, however, the trilogy is also a meditation on identity, feminism, fate, literature, celebrity, family, captivity, the indifference of nature, and on and on and on. There are so many ways to encounter the texts that they demand multiple readings, and I'm excited to start them again. 

Cusk ignores some literary elements: plot totally, and mostly setting. But she's eager to include clear symbolism, like feral dogs, or airplanes, or fire, or the ocean, or architecture. These are relentlessly present in her slim works, and as readers we know that she's circling back on herself, fixating on these images. Since she leaves out so much, the spotlight shines brightly on what she chooses to observe. And yet, what are we to make of the dogs, tearing through houses, feasting on wild animals, ripping families apart as the members choose loyalty to pets more than to each other? Like Flannery O'Connor, the symbols are in one sense blunt and obvious, and in another sense very resistant to easy interpretation. I feel like whole graduate-level courses could be  taught on the Outline Trilogy, with each student writing volumes on one aspect of this incredible work.