Rachel Cusk is the most unsettling and philosophically astute British novelist at work today. The author of fifteen books, she is best known for her memoirs, A Life’s Work (2001) and Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012), and the novels that comprise the Outline trilogy (2014–18). The narrator of the trilogy is a divorced writer named Faye who participates in writers’ workshops and literary festivals in Europe. She is self-effacing, passive, and unusually receptive to other people’s stories, which she listens to without any explicit commentary. Yet Faye’s narration of these stories is rigorous, controlled, and judgmental—at moments, shockingly so—shifting from tenderness to cruelty in its descriptions of her interlocutors’ faces, bodies, and confessions. The result is a tense, dramatic experiment in novelistic ethics, a struggle between self and other that led Cusk to declare, in a 2018 interview with Alexandra Schwartz, “I don’t think character exists anymore.”
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