“You survive your own death,” she explains, after which “there’s nothing left to do except talk about it.” I couldn’t help thinking this sounded like something Faye, or Cusk herself, might say. Linda says the story reminded her of having a baby. The woman had been in a skiing accident and broken nearly every bone in her body. When a writer named Linda appears in the novel with “elaborately strappy high-heeled sandals” in which she can hardly walk and her hair in “matted-looking hanks,” we might assume she’s a figure of fun or pity, but pages later, she’s recounting a conversation with a woman on an airplane that’s strikingly reminiscent of Faye’s own encounters. Instead, Cusk has triumphed in the completion of this masterly trilogy the reader must continue guessing at meaning, improvising and reworking it as the story unfolds. Anyone who really believed that would put the book down there and then-or stop writing it.

The novel seems a form particularly ill-suited to make the point that narrative itself is merely self-deception. And this tension-between Faye as the passive protagonist on one hand, and the selective and discriminating narrator on the other-might be the chief animating force of the trilogy. Cusk must draw on all the resources of willfulness to construct an image of a life lived without will. At the same time, the very existence of these highly stylized and innovative books makes nonsense of that idea. At one point in the first novel, Outline, she remarks, “I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.” In a way, as Faye is drawn forward not by her own desires but by randomness and the interventions of others, this trilogy offers a document of passivity, a record of the passive life. She plays the role of listener-an engaged and challenging listener, certainly, but still more receptive than active. Faye speaks relatively little, and usually to offer questions or interpretations of what she hears rather than stories of her own.

Rachel cusk kudos