Transit by Rachel Cusk

I’ll be honest, my feelings about Transit by Rachel Cusk are all over the place. She’s a major award-nominated writer, whose previous novel Outline was much lauded, although I admit I haven’t read it. I hadn’t come across her before until I saw the book on the bargain pile at Munros. I read the blurb and was intrigued enough to shell out my $7.99 for it.

The basic premise of the book is of a writer who moves to London with her two young sons after her marriage goes down the pan. She moves into a flat that needs a lot of TLC and is situated above a couple of nightmare neighbours. Over the course of the novel we come to know a little more about her neighbours, friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

I’ve been trying to analyse why I’m so at sixes and sevens with this book. The first chapter intrigued the hell out of me, and I thought, yep, here we go. Then I spent most of chapter two feeling annoyed and that the writer was showing off her admittedly extended vocabulary, but in a pretty unnecessary manner – case in point, the description of a little girl’s “sagacious brown eyes”. Sorry, that just bugged me.

However, I remembered I’d been intrigued by chapter one, so carried on and I’m glad I did. It’s a curious novel and, at least from my perspective, not a story in the traditional sense of having a start, middle and end. The book is well named “Transit”. This is a book about transitions, about the places and the moments between things – her flat in the midst of renovation we never see the conclusion of, the tentative setting of a date we don’t see happen, the attendance of a writer’s festival where we don’t get to know what our heroine says, the Polish builder missing his homeland and family and wondering if it would be easier not to go back and visit rather than exist in this state of transient misery. It’s about the spaces in-between, and how they aren’t just the stepping-stones, they’re the warp and weft of life in its own right. (God that sounded pretentious.)

Each chapter acts as a cutting portrait of the people the writer encounters (and I say ‘writer’ advisedly, because we don’t get to know her name until almost the end, which makes me wonder how she sees herself). We’re there with our writer as she watches a mother drag her reluctant son to get his hair cut. We’re there when a fellow writer recounts tales about his abusive childhood. We’re there when one of the writer’s students asks for guidance in how to transform her 300,000 words of notes into a book. And we’re wonderfully there when she visits her cousin and his new wife at a dinner party which goes into spectacular meltdown over a baby chicken. 

What is both frustrating and fascinating is that all of these encounters are beautifully and enticingly drawn, and everyone one of them could have been a pillar of a novel in its own right, if not a novel itself. But for me, that’s kind of the point of Transit. All of these encounters, all of these moments are transitory – they touch on our writer, they are absorbed into her life and perhaps they will influence her next steps, or perhaps not. We don’t know because we only get these glimpses, like scenes through a window. We leave the writer to pick up her keys, leave the house and decide what she does next.

I think you will to be in a certain mood to read this novel. I’m glad I persevered, and I’m pretty sure I’ll go back and reread after I’ve had some distance from it. I suspect that I’ll get a lot more out of it on the second read.

Transit by Rachel Cusk was first published in 2017, and my copy is published by Harper Collins.