In each of the past few summers, I’ve read one Rachel Cusk novel, rationing them out in the hopes that she can write them faster than I read them. This year I picked up , the finale of Cusk’s trilogy, a series that dramatically pivoted both her career and the genre of literary fiction. Each of the three are largely similar, subjecting its semi-autobiographical protagonist to the oppressive heat of an unnamed European location and just a few, chapter-length, conversations with fellow travellers.
The dialogue dodges masterfully between realism and melodrama, as the slightest questions from the protagonist (who barely speaks) reliably prompt the strangers she meets to embark on multiple pages of soul-searching monologue. People don’t really talk like this in real life, but maybe they want to. I miss or forget parts of every time I read it.
The book’s title is a mammoth claim, and Wood works, unfalteringly, at the level of the microscope. Speaking generally, his thesis is a defence of literary realism, but almost all of Wood’s paragraphs handle a new textual morsel – a paragraph, a sentence, even just a comma – accompanied by neat and rounded thought. I came to feel that the book was some kind of closed-experiment, a series of highly and paradoxically controlled ricochets.
He lifts this from – “the day waves yellow with all its crops” – and plunges into its strange, surprising centre – that smearing verb-noun combination. For Wood, it “conveys a sense th.