Kudos blurs the line between memoir and fiction. The novel’s narrator, a stand-in for Cusk herself, travels to various interviews and literary festivals in Europe and recounts her conversations with the strangers she meets along the way. The vignettes offer masterful accounts of the complexities of human hearts and interactions that pull at something inside me, either to unravel or to create new knots on which to pull.
What is most compelling to me are the contradictions in human experiences made palpable by Kudos being a book of triangles. Partway through the book, it occurred to me that there was a motif of three points playing off of one another and individuals being mediated themselves by the other two points. It read to me like Cusk applied the lessons of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, though with a great deal of subtlety.
In one of the earliest narratives, Cusk’s seat partner on a plane is a boisterous man introduced as having “an abashed and easy confidentiality that made it clear he spoke for the purpose of entertainment rather than to arouse consternation” (10). In just a few sentences, Cusk creates a sketch that establishes vivid depths in a character that could be lifted right out of your nightmare interactions with Commerce Bros. (In fact, Cusk has a knack for offering rich characterization in just a few strokes). Her gentle evisceration of the character nonetheless retains, though, the sympathetic touch needed to engage with him authentically: “He had grown animated while he spoke and his desperate, wild-eyed demeanour had softened into the genial mask of the raconteur, I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you” (10). There’s a convergence of overconfidence, vulnerability, and performance that allows you that balances an uneasy revulsion with a touch of sympathy and, as a result of both, a compelling story from which you cannot look away.
From there, the man tells the story of his wife and his dog (notably a triangle). The marriage is not a happy one, exactly, and the man feels slighted by his wife and daughter. There’s a sense in which he is slighted by a family that exploits him, not that he is a particularly downtrodden figure. Everyone loves the family dog, and he feels a certain propriety over loving it. The dog is sick, though, and when his wife and daughter travel away from home for a few days they demand that he call with updates. Instead, he wrestles with the private and devastating decision of whether the dog needs to be put down. He decides yes and he has a vet come by to administer its final shot. The moment is a tormented one—largely, actually, because the main is waiting for the dog to die and is wracked by his own ignorance of whether the moment has passed. Then, without telling his family he buries the dog in the backyard and then leaves on a plane, where he encounters Cusk’s avatar. It’s a memorable story, powerful for the depths of its darkness and the clearly strained relationships between all of its human occupants. It sets that tone of contradiction, of elements fighting against one another, that seems reflective of the novel as a whole.
In fact, Cusk recounts another novelist’s story that follows a similar trajectory, but as a kind of distorted mirrored image. In the story, a married couple gets their daughter a hamster. Then, the husband and daughter bond over the hamster and inspire jealousy in the wife, Linda. She also starts to sympathize with the hamster, whose “imprisonment got increasingly on Linda’s nerves” (55). She thinks, “WHat kind of love was this, that needed the love object domesticated and locked up? And if there was love being handed out, why wasn’t she getting any?” (55). There’s a clear commentary on marriage politics and a kind of reverse Electra complex, wherein it occurs to Linda “that since their daughter had found a satisfactory companion in the hamster, her husband might have taken the opportunity to round that situation out by returning his attention to his wife, yet the opposite was the case: he could leave the child alone less than ever” (55). Linda begins to doubt his love of the hamster, and also of the daughter:
Every time she went near the cage he would leap to his feet to join her, until Linda wondered whether he was actually jealous of the hamster and was only pretending to love it as a way of keeping hold of her. She wondered whether secretly he wanted to kill it, and since she’d realised in the meantime that she felt at best ambivalent about the possibility of him resuming an interest in herself, it became important to keep the hamster alive.
I feel like Cusk looks into the darkness inside each of us, especially those internal contradictions. In this case, Linda wants to destroy the hamster as the object of affection, and yet also feels compelled to maintain it, even feeling “sorry for the hamster as the unwitting victim of the mutual narcissism of human relationships” (56). An odd parallel emerges with the hamsters. Linda “had heard that if you put two hamsters in a cage together they would end up killing each other” (56). I can’t help but see that as a reflection of her relationship with her husband, and so the triangle—as painful as it is to exist within it—is a necessity.
The ending of the story is undecided. In one version, the author imagines that the daughter loves the hamster “so much that she sets it free” (56) and in the other “it is Linda herself who frees it, opening the cage and shooing it out of the apartment while her daughter is at school” (56). It’s interesting that both motivations lead to the same outcome for the hamster, but the malice of the latter version doubles down: “Worse still, she allows her daughter to think that she herself left the cage open by mistake that morning and that she is therefore to blame” (56). The protection towards her own ego demands such intense hatred of others’ joys; it’s an eclipse that passes over our hearts.
To help answer the question of interior motives, I’ll reappropriate and decontextualize Cusk’s own words: “the very opacity of those mysteries [...] was in itself grounds for terror, for if the world seemed full of people living evilly, without reprisal and living virtuously without reward, the temptation to abandon personal morality might arise in exactly the moment when personal morality is most significant. Justice, in other words, was something you had to honour for its own sake” (42). Ultimately, through the stories of the characters in the book, the novel as a whole reads as a kind of moral instruction, even if the lessons are ones you have to infer, rather than ones that are told to you.
When Cusk makes her way to various literary festivals, meeting her agent for drinks at the bar, talking with other authors, and shmoozing around with supposedly significant figures. The commentary the book provides on the literary world is consistently penetrating. For instance, in conversation with a publisher of Sudoku puzzles and some minor literature, we are given a glance into the world of publishing. He offers the following overview of what publishers want:
What all publishers were looking for, he went on – the holy grail, as it were, of the modern literary scene – were those writers who performed well in the market while maintaining a connection to the values of literature; in other words, who wrote books that people could actually enjoy without feeling in the least demeaned by being seen reading them. He had managed to secure quite a collection of those writers, and apart from the Sudoku and the popular thrillers, they were chiefly responsible for the upswing in the company’s fortune. (37)
The conversation begins with a kind of contradiction—popular, but not common; literary, but not pretentious; commercial, but not base. In response to the capitalistic reality of the industry, Cusk’s narrator
was struck by his observation that the preservation of literary values – in however nominal a form – was a factor in the achievement of popular success. In England, I said, people liked to live in old houses that had been thoroughly refurbished with modern conveniences, and I wondered whether the same principle might be applied to novels; and if so, whether the blunting or loss of our own instinct for beauty was responsible for it. (38)
The publisher then exclaims how people love “combustion” and how “you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion, not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty – anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue” (38). Not that I ever stop thinking about it, but it reminds me of Zadie Smith’s saying that conservatives are arsonists. It also makes me think of the philosophy of accelerationism, of burning through as many things as possible to bring about the future more quickly. There’s a similar flavour in Cusk’s perception, voiced through the publisher, as you might find in Tom McCarthy’s work. What is being combusted? He answers:
It may be time itself [...] that we are burning. For example the English writer Jane Austen: I have observed the way in which, over the space of a few years, the novels of this long-dead spinster were used up,’ he said, ‘burned one after another as spin-offs and sequels, films, self-help books, and even, I believe, a reality TV show. Despite the meagre facts of her life, even the author herself has finally been consumed on the pyre of popular biography. Whether or not it looks like preservation [...] ‘it is in fact the desire to use the essence until every last drop of it is gone. Miss Austen made a good fire [...] but in the case of my own successful authors it is the concept of literature itself that is being combusted. (38-39).
I find the passage extraordinarily apt. Consider, for example, the culture of sequels, reboots, remakes, and so on, that we see across all artforms. There’s a cynical destruction at the core of our consumption, a kind of contradiction wherein the more something is loved the more we hate it—or at least act as if we hate it, destroying it, committing an act of sacrilege each time we turn our love into another form of consumption. And yet, he points out, there is no going back:
There was, he added, a generalised yearning for the ideal of literature, as for the lost world of childhood, whose authority and reality tended to seem so much greater than that of the present moment. Yet to return to that reality even for a day would for most people be intolerable, as well as impossible: despite our nostalgia for the past and for history, we would quickly find ourselves unable to live there for reasons of discomfort, since the defining motivation of the modern era, he said, whether consciously or not, is the pursuit of freedom from stricture or hardships of any kind. (39)
I have a fascination with nostalgia. The core of it is well-known: nostalgia is an impossibility: when we actively seek to recapture that which makes us nostalgic, it can only end in disappointment. That is already known, but what Cusk highlights really effectively is the core of the contradiction. Obtaining nostalgia is “discomfort” because “the defining motivation of the modern era [...] is the pursuit of freedom from stricture or hardships of any kind.” I think that’s such a compelling notion, as if nostalgia ties us to our history and that that is, as Joyce put it in Ulysses, “the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” The publisher continues on, “What is history other than memory without pain?” (39).
The commentary that Cusk offers on literary festivals themselves is pretty grim, too. One of her interlocutors talks about “the inferiority of these occasions to the work that was their subject, which seemed to be circled with increasing aimlessness and never penetrated” (105). Rather than talking about literature at a deeper level, “We get to walk in the grounds [...] but we never enter the building” (105). As a result, “the purpose of festivals like this one had become less and less clear to her [...] while the personal value of books had—for her at least—increased” (105). I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the purpose of talking about books. Data would suggest that almost nobody engages with my reviews, for instance. BookTok is seemingly just a surface-level marketing of ‘what’s popular’. Where does the discourse actually happen? It’s hard to engage in conversations, especially in short-form media, since readers generally think for themselves and reading demands attention, so it’s not exactly consumer-friendly. Anyway, Cusk’s character notes that literary festivals “make a public concern out of a private pastime” and yet that very format “was spawning a literature of its own, in that many of the writers invited here excelled at public appearances while producing work she found frankly mediocre” (105). I find that’s fascinating — it’s like a literary version of Oscarbait. Extending the metaphor, she notes that “in the case of such people [...] there are only the grounds: the building isn’t there, or if it is, it’s a temporary structure that will be swept away by the next storm” (105). I find it an effective metaphor that creates a distinction in forms of literary consumption. For the speaker, she reverts to the past “landmarks of literary history” (105), and “meanwhile, the unstoppable juggernaut of commercial literary success pressed on, though she had the sense that the marriage between the two principles – commerce and literature – was not in the best health” (105) and presents a peculiar optimism that all of the notion of public taste and the commercial industry might fall apart. The global market might fall apart, but “leaving the small rock of authentic literature where it always was” (105).
While Cusk is incredibly astute with literature, she also demonstrates some great insight into visual arts. In the last third of the novel, she starts discussing an artist of whom I have distinct memories. Initially describing the artwork obliquely, when Cusk revealed the author of the text, I felt that little thrill of being right, of recognizing that it was indeed Louise Bourgeois. The way Cusk embeds an analysis of her work within the text feels organic and insightful, and it brought me back to my first exposure to her artwork: concrete clothing sprawled about the gallery.
There’s an artistry to Cusk’s voice that encapsulates the sense of real life while simultaneously elevating the our perception of the cultural artifacts around us. In response to Louise Bourgeois’ work, Cusk offers a passage that I think is critical to a philosophy of art. She writes that “A work of art could not, ultimately, be negative: its material existence, its status as an object, could not help but be positive, a gain to the sum of what was” (181). Despite all the negativity and cynicism of peoples’ motivations throughout the book, the book itself offers something more to the spirit. Cusk continues to note that “the self-destructive novel, like the self-destructive person, was something from which in the end you remained helplessly separated, forced to watch a spectacle — the soul turning on itself — in which you were powerless to intervene” (181). I think there’s a lot of truth in this kind of assertion, and why faux-nihilistic books are often so disappointing. There needs to be something to believe in, and tearing things down is only half the battle.
I feel like Cusk strives for that positive artwork, a “gain to the sum of what was” — the collection of stories herein comprise a kind of worldview, an aesthetics of the everyday connections we find, but elevated by allowing the characters to jump into the deep stuff. The cast of characters—from the boisterous man who put down his dog to the math-oriented tour guide trying to calculate the best way of doing tours—are all enriching in their own way. Thematically, there are connections between them that help to create a mosaic whose pieces can be read individually or collectively.
Cusk’s commentary on ‘great art’, as voiced through one of her characters, continues on to note that it “was very often brought to the service of this self-immolation, as great intelligence and sensitivity often characterised those who found the world an impossible place to live in; yet the spectre of madness was so discomfiting that it made surrender to the writing unfeasible; on stayed on one’s guard, as a child might stay on its guard against a mad parent, knowing itself ultimately alone” (182). Continuing on, Cusk comments on the various forms of honesty as presented in literature: “Negative literature [...] got much of its power through the fearless use of honesty: a person with no interest in living and hence no investment in the future can afford to be honest [...] and the same dubious privilege was extended to the negative writer” (182). It’s a premise that has been repeated ad nauseam: the subversive artist can be honest because there’s no reason to go on in the world. Cusk offers a different perspective on that honesty being “unpalatable” (183): “in a sense it went to waste, perhaps because no one cared for the honesty of someone who was jumping the ship the rest of us were stuck on” (183). Cusk herself feels entrenched in the real world and “The real honesty, of course, was that of the person who remained on board and endeavoured to tell the truth about it” (183). I love that voice from the inside that speaks truth to ourselves and offers us a mirror into our own souls.
The end of the book offers one last critique of the industry in a clever way. The final scene offers one that is seemingly so common it’s nearly a cliche: a woman walks into the water. I’m thinking in particular of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which famously ends with its main character walking into the ocean to her death. Kudos ends with its main character walking into the water as well, evoking that idea of a self-destructive writer only to subvert it with the narrator peeing—a bodily function that helps to point towards the fundamental aliveness of the main character. It’s a surprising and amusing turn, subverting expectations and ultimately serving as an affirming end (even as it helps to destroy a famous literary trope).
Admittedly, I’ve been sitting on this review for a month. Whenever time passes, I feel it’s not my best work since the work isn’t as immediate to me. That said, I really quite like Rachel Cusk’s work, and Kudos was another worthwhile read for me. She has a particularly entrancing and distinctive voice that is well-worth engaging with, if for no other reason that it provides an aspirational version of what conversations with strangers might be.
Happy reading!
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