We are back in the company of our nearly-anonymous narrator from Outline and Transit. I say "nearly" because her name is Faye (indeed the three-book sequence is informally known is some quarters as the "Faye trilogy"); we know this because it's (slightly archly) mentioned exactly once in each book (page 227 of 232 in my copy of this one).
Kudos opens pretty much exactly as Outline did; our narrator (a novelist) is on an aeroplane on her way to some literary event and strikes up a conversation with the man sitting next to her. Well, I say "conversation", but that implies some sort of reciprocal two-way thing, and in fact, in common with most of the conversations in all three books, this is largely one-way, the anonymous stranger telling a story after minimal prompting from our narrator, this story being a convoluted tale of woe involving his wife and daughter and a dead dog.
On arrival in Berlin for the literary event our narrator checks into her hotel and meets with her publisher, a couple of other authors, of varying ages and degrees of career development and success, and an interviewer. A similar process occurs with the ensuing conversations - with minimal encouragement people expound at some length on a variety of topics, usually centered around some event in their own lives but with plenty of more general philosophical musing on the side. Then there is an organised walking tour of Berlin, with the narrator and the guide, Hermann, striding purposefully off ahead of the group and finding that the subsequent waiting around for everyone to catch up offers further opportunities for conversation. Back at the hotel canteen the various authors struggle to negotiate the complex coupon system that enables them to get food, and we meet a couple of other authors, Gerta and Ryan. Ryan is the same guy as we met early in Outline, but now transformed from easy-going guy doing a casual teaching gig to terrifyingly driven, highly successful, gaunt, Fitbit-obsessed exercise fanatic.
We then move on to a barely-distinguishable literary event in a slightly warmer coastal location, probably Spain or Portugal, and more authors, in particular Sophia and her taciturn friend Luis, part of a group who go out to a restaurant, talk gloomily about their various divorces and push mysterious oily fish round their plates for a couple of hours. Then there are more interviews, and a meeting in a restaurant with the narrator's editor and translator wherein wine is drunk and further talk is talked. Going for a walk to clear her head, the narrator takes a phone call from her son, and, having talked him down from the grip of some minor crisis, wanders onto a nudist beach, strips off and takes a dip in the sea.
We can probably get the griping out of the way first: this is the third novel in this vein and so the novelty of Outline's structure and narrative voice has worn off a bit (not that it was as unprecedented as some seemed to think anyway), the business of most of the characters being either writers or critics or interviewers (i.e. people who either write, write about writers or talk to writers about writing) runs the risk of the whole thing disappearing up its own fundament, and the central character's own passivity and humourlessness grate a bit after a while. It's all very white and middle-class as well; I'm not well-versed enough in Marxist literary theory to feel emboldened enough to call a novel "bourgeois", but if I were this is the sort of novel I might do it for. The other obvious point to make is that in a novel supposedly populated by actual human beings who resemble in at least some respects the ones you and I know who populate planet Earth, nobody speaks in a way that at all resembles how actual people speak. This is just a structural problem with any novel that wants to articulate complex philosophical ideas and doesn't have an omniscient narrative voice that can just dump great big tracts onto the page: at least one of your characters has to articulate those ideas in a way that sounds like a series of things someone might plausibly actually say, which is inherently tricky. The gimmick of having the narrator's name be uttered only once, usually right at the end of the book, comes across as just that (i.e. a gimmick), particularly in Kudos where it's uttered by her son, slightly jarringly as he's just referred to his father as "Dad".
Tish and pish to all that, though, because this is still intensely readable (helped by being quite short), a brave and interesting formal and structural experiment, and there's nothing wrong with a book that makes some demands on the intelligence of its readers. It's easy, but dangerous, to make assumptions about how much events here are meant to mirror the author's own life: recently-divorced fortysomething novelist, mother of two teenage children, etc. etc., but what does seem pretty clear is that Cusk herself is fiercely intelligent, slightly intense and a bit humourless, rather like her narrator here.
Previous series of at least three books where all of them feature on this blog are Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and William Gibson's Bridge trilogy. Only one book to go for Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series to join that list: watch this space.
