An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. She could see things that I could not; my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky. This information was causing her great excitement when she considered the changes it might represent. For a small fee she would share it with me and enable me to turn it to my advantage.Transit is the second book in a planned trilogy by Rachel Cusk, and following on the heels of Outline – which I found to be thin, and dull, and lacking energy – this intermediate work suffers all the same drawbacks with the added detriment of purposefully not reaching any kind of conclusion (my perpetual complaint about all middle volumes of series). According to The New York Times (“fat with substance”), The Atlantic (“elegant, spare, and often very beautiful”), and The Guardian (“tremendous” and “triumphant”), Cusk's writing is all going over my head as she attempts to reinvent the novel, and while I acknowledge my shortcomings as a reader, I know what I like; and this simply isn't it.
Outline saw a woman named Faye (named only once, late in the book), escaping her failed marriage by taking the opportunity to travel to Greece in order to teach a writing course. Transit picks up Faye's story (again, she's named only once, late in this book) as she decides to move to London with her two sons, and as the “worst house on the best street” that she's able to afford needs a complete reno, the boys are sent to stay with their father. As in the first book, Faye is a careful listener and the plot (such as it is) mostly involves conversations about other people's lives. In what seems like a nod to the first book, the first conversation Faye has is with an ex from long ago, Gerard, and of him she thinks, “In those days he was a sketch, an outline; I had wanted him to be more than he was, without being able to see where the extra would come from.” Many of the ensuing conversations seem to cover and recover recurring themes. In response to a contractor who says families in the homes he renovates treat him like he's invisible, Faye responds:
I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children were often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account.This idea is picked up later by a memoirist at a writer's festival:
Parents sometimes have a problem with that. They have this child that's a sort of silent witness to their lives, then the child grows up and starts blabbing their secrets all over the place and they don't like it.And taken to the extreme by a Swedish immigrant at a dinner party:
It was perhaps this feeling of unreality that had caused her, at a certain point, to begin recording her family without them realising it. She used a cassette player she'd been given, positioning it on a shelf near the kitchen table and changing the tape each day.And the various conversations recall and intersect each other – covering such topics as fate, loneliness, parenting, and creativity. Concerning freedom, this is Faye speaking to her hairdresser:
When people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn't necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them.And a Polish labourer:
For as long as he could remember he had felt it inside him, the frantic presence of something trapped that ought to be wild, something whose greatest vulnerability lay in its capacity to lose its freedom.And one of the trolls who live in her basement (a couple who don't appreciate the noise coming from upstairs):
She was growing aroused: I watched her big body writhe slightly, her head twisting from side to side, as though something inside her was rising and unfolding, wanting to be born. She was, I saw, goading herself on: she wanted to traverse boundaries, as though to prove to herself that she was free.While there is much about freedom/fate that seems to concern the first use of the word “transit” in the book (from that initial quote about the astrologer), there is another meaning used that might explain this focus on converging themes in the various conversations:
The Tube station stood at a junction where five roads converged like the spokes of a wheel. The traffic sat at the lights, each lane waiting for its turn. Sometimes it seemed that the junction was a place of confluence; at other times, when the traffic thundered constantly over the intersection in a chaotic river of buses and bicycles and cars, it felt like a mere passageway, a place of transit.It's not just broad themes that get repeated, but details, too. Faye comes straight out of a conversation with the contractor who is renovating her home (a man estranged from his father because of differing house-building aesthetics), to having coffee with an old friend (whose house has been under constant renovation for years – a fact she was finally able to use to make a connection with her house-flipping parents; this woman is now trying to adopt a baby), and Faye soon meets a man for dinner who relates the unhappy history of his own adoptive family (and laments that his handyman father didn't leave him his tools in his will). Faye's old boyfriend, Gerard, says that he removed all the interior walls from his flat, wanting to be able to see all the way through from front to back; the Polish contractor talks later of having built a home of windows, without interior walls. Gerard bonded with his current wife when he took off her dog's leash and it ran away; a writing student relates buying a hunting dog that doesn't need to be leashed. And I don't know what to make of it all.
There really isn't much plot – it can be reduced to, “A recently divorced woman buys a flat and has it renovated” – and while there are all these conversations, they're minutiae; not poignant or fascinating moments. And I think that what bothers me the most is that we don't get to know Faye at all and I have no one to identify with; I'm not having any kind of emotional reaction. And while I'm sure the fault is entirely mine, I'm not recognising the genius of the effort; I'm having no intellectual reaction either. As I'm sure I'll eventually pick up the third book of this trilogy, here's hoping it all makes sense in the end.
The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck
After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):
I Am a Truck
Minds of Winter
Son of a Trickster
Bellevue Square
Transit