Kudos: A Novel (Outline Trilogy, 3)

An Amazon Best Book of June 2018: Do you wish you could have read Virginia Woolf in 1927? If so, you should be reading Rachel Cusk in 2018. With her new novel, Kudos, Cusk brings to a close a trilogy that’s the smartest, most nuanced of any fiction about the politics of sex and privilege written in decades. Readers of the two previous books in the trilogy have followed Faye, a writer and divorced mother of two sons, from a teaching stint in Athens, to London, where she undertakes a near-disastrous apartment renovation and begins a new romance. Now in Kudos, Faye, remarried, travels to a literary festival in an unnamed European country where misogyny seems especially entrenched. But plot lines don’t begin to describe Cusk’s rare intelligence, mean wit, and innovative style, which is what makes her writing so remarkable. Most evident is her method of narrating each novel through the voices of the people Faye encounters, so that Faye is revealed almost exclusively through her side of their conversations. The result? The reader stays continually hungry for Faye’s perspective, which is meted out slyly and parsimoniously. Though there is a feminist edge to Faye’s sensibility, we never feel drowned by it, perhaps because Faye’s sons, and her new marriage, suggest hope for the future. Kudos begins and ends with men behaving badly: in the final instance, Faye witnesses a gross, aggressive act with the patience of someone who knows such antics can’t last forever. “I looked into his cruel, merry eyes,” she says, “and waited for him to stop.” —Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review