Transit by Rachel Cusk

I said that my current feelings of powerlessness had changed the way I looked at what happens and why, to the extent that I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next. That idea--of one's own life as something that had already been dictated--was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy. Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, as much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, I said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness. For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

In these sequel to Rachel Cusk's Outline, the narrator Faye--who you'd be forgiven for thinking has no name at all, being mentioned only once here and maybe that many times in Outline--has moved back to London with her two children. This is part of the rebuilding of her life after the catastrophe of divorce only alluded to in Outline, and she begins to rebuild quite literally, buying a shitty house in a good street and paying to have it renovated. The title Transit alludes both to the inexorable passing of time and the possibility of change, of being in one place and arriving at another, as well as the "transit" of planets and stars in the horoscope that might tell her what the future holds. The house, in a way that is obvious but compelling, becomes the symbol of change and its possibility: can you really make a good house out of a bad one, or is it a lost cause? And what do you do with the couple in the basement, who are so enraged by the sound of your transformation they threaten to spit in your face?

Transit is no less thoughtful, touching, or funny than Outline, but it's such a carbon copy in style and reasoning that it's hard not to feel a little let down. The methods that seemed so revolutionary and engaging in Outline seem a little more contrived and farcical here, for no other reason than they lack freshness. It's frustrating, for one, to see the narrator Faye receding again from the narrative. Like Outline, Transit is mostly made up of other peoples' stories, and Faye is so reticent to respond that the connections between other people and herself always seem oblique. And in Transit I also began to wonder what it is that makes people spill their guts to Faye, and how she only encounters people who are so philosophical and abstract. "I had found out more," Faye says, "by listening than I had ever thought possible." But when listening goes on so long it begins to seem pathological.

Cusk does throw in some interesting variations. I was struck how, in this novel, Faye is forced to "listen" through interpretive barriers, first with her Albanian builder Tony and then with his Polish assistant Pavel, whose English is even worse than Tony's. She gets a story out of both Tony and Pavel, but the tension--is she really getting the story, or is the process of translation (another suggestion of "trans-it") mucking it up--puts the narrative mode in sudden tension. Cusk underlines this moment by having Faye gift Pavel a Polish translation of her work, one that she mistrusts: "sometimes," she says about working with the translator, "talking about certain passages in the book, I would feel her creation begin to supersede mine, not in the sense that she violated what I had written but that it was now living through her, not me." And the couple in the basement flat flout the narrative mode most of all, because their unvarnished hatred for the narrator precludes them from telling any story at all.

Transit is a funny kind of sequel. Despite the suggestions of its title, it's hard to recognize any kind of growth or change at all, or even a forward narrative. No sooner is the house finished than Cusk whisks the narrative off to someone else's country home for the final forty pages, in a way that seems designed to frustrate our sense of the symbol's inevitability. The conversations are all about ways in which the characters have changed, but they themselves don't constitute change; I'm not sure the novel really believes in change as a meaningful concept at all.