By Martha Thornycroft
Despite being nearly seven years behind the trend, I started the New Year reading Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (2018), the third in her Outline trilogy. The three books follow a novelist – Faye – as she navigates life as a divorcée and mother to two boys, whilst simultaneously working and juggling a career with personal demands. What makes the trilogy so interesting, however, is how the narrative voice blends into the background (as evidenced by the title Outline), allowing secondary characters to occupy the foreground and transform the narrative with their distinctive voices. Cusk writes the trilogy in such a way that there is no prescribed reading order. This flexibility means that each novel can be approached independently, allowing you to dip in and out of her novels as you wish. It was for exactly this reason that I reached for the final novel, Kudos, around the 1st of January, knowing my reading would contain some much-needed wisdom, and encourage some self-reflection for the New Year.
Cusk’s language is deceptively simplistic, providing profound insights into the human experience. Flicking through my well-thumbed copies, the many dog-eared pages speak volumes. Her books are eminently quotable and almost every chapter contains a universal truth worth remembering. For instance, in Outline, she writes, ’What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.’ As Alexandra Schwartz writes in The New Yorker, the characters in Cusk’s trilogy ‘swoop from the minute banality of personal experience to touch on the great themes of human life and society and back again.’ For this reason, Cusk manages to subtly capture the essence of what it is to be alive in the early 21st century – an elusive sentiment to define, considering that we are still living in it.
Whilst reading Kudos, I was struck by the honesty and frankness of Cusk’s depiction of Faye’s encounters with the various characters she meets, sharing deeply insightful and unfiltered aspects of their life. It made me question the narrator’s role: is the narrative voice (and Cusk herself) analysing the people she meets, or are these characters, in fact, analysing themselves? On this basis, the narrator (and Cusk) seems to occupy a therapist-adjacent status, not only for the novel’s characters but also for the reader. Cusk’s novels invite introspection, where the characters’ process of identifying their faults prompts us to do the same. There is something cathartic in recognising a shared trait in another person – albeit a fictional character. Frequently, while reading the trilogy, I found myself thinking: “Maybe that’s why I behave like that.” or “I know exactly who this reminds me of.” By relating to Cusk’s characters, I gained a more lucid understanding of myself. Therefore, in this sense, her novels have a dual function – serving as both entertainment and self-help novels.
Why do I think this trilogy, particularly Kudos, is pertinent to 2025? In a year coined ‘202thrive’ on social media, I believe it is fair to say that the social culture of wellness and mindfulness is gaining more and more traction – with myself included. Cusk’s novels offer a more feasible way of actioning that New Year’s resolution of being more introspective or aware of how we interact with others. Reading the Outline trilogy is, in my opinion, the ideal way to have a reflective start to 2025.