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. 

Whiskey When We're Dry

Whiskey When We're Dry by John Larison is a big western novel set in the 1880's in a state somewhere near Colorado. Its protagonist is a hardscrabble teenage girl, recently orphaned, on a quest to find her outlaw older brother. Larison is a proud Oregon State MFA grad and instructor, and this fine novel has attracted notice in Hollywood, where its story has been acquired by the same people that made the new Planet of the Apes reboots. If the film (or TV adaptation) follows the book at all, it will be fast-paced, violent, and surprising.

Whiskey When We're Dry is balanced in that the action never lags. The setting would change every page and a half or so, but the writing wasn't gimmicky--ending each chapter with cliffhangers, for example. But because it moved so quickly, it felt light and cinematic. I was reminded of the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar! or Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! While the novel mercifully lacked an exclamation point in the title, it often was as breezy as those films. All three works were masterfully made, with consistent and inviting voices, but Whiskey When We're Dry achieved a greater depth in its high stakes, eventually inhabiting the territory of Cormac McCarthy or Herman Melville. Actually, the closest comparison I can think of is another great western, John Williams's Butcher's Crossing. In that novel, a young transcendentalist heads west and, after unspeakable violence and calamity, becomes a cold-blooded early modernist. Both novels are adventurous. Both include coming-of-age protagonists. And both use the vehicle of the western novel to transport the reader into much darker and introspective places.

Spring

Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard is the third in his "seasons" tetralogy. Each is a letter to his daughter, who is in utereo, and then an infant, in the year the series covers. Spring, and the entire series, resists easy genre definitions. They're a blend of essay and memoir, leaning heavily on one in one installment, and abandoning that form in another. This one is mostly a long memoir that drifts around one horrifying event. The whole book hovers over the tragedy like a haze, and it's as gripping as it is uncomfortable. 

Knausgaard is probably my favorite active writer now. He's weird and banal and dour--and absolutely fantastic. I could read him write about anything. He usually does write about anything: making breakfast, finding a parking spot, arguing with his kids over TV time, mowing the lawn. Somehow, it's great. He's figured out how to describe the most tedious events with enough suspense and tension that later, after about twenty pages or so, you're in a completely different place. When the shattering event does happen in his work, you've been inhabiting his world for so long, in such a believable way, that it's all the more devastating.