Introduction

Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax.

In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.

Editorial Review

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

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