Kudos by Rachel Cusk

To return to the subject of the college's award, he said, the name they had chosen for it was 'Kudos.' As I was probably aware, the Greek word 'kudos' was a singular noun that had become plural by a process of back formation: a kudo on its own had never actually existed, but in modern usage its collective meaning had been altered by the confusing presence of a plural suffix, so that 'kudos' therefore meant, literally, 'prizes,' but in its original form it connoted the broader concept of recognition or acclaim, as well as being suggestive of something which might be falsely claimed by someone else. For instance, he had heard his mother complaining to someone on the phone the other day that the board of directors took the kudos for the festival's success while she did all the work. In light of his mother's remarks about male and female, the choice of this fabricated plural was quite interesting: the individual had been superseded by the collective, yet he believed it still left the question of evil entirely open. Admittedly, despite extensive research, he had been unable to find anything to corroborate his mother's use of the word in a context of misappropriation. Could prizes be given to the wrong person, without malintent coming into it?

At one point in Kudos, the final book in Rachel Cusk's trilogy that began with Outline and continued in Transit, an interviewer tells Cusk's stand-in Faye that he is going to interview her as if he is a character in her books. We know instantly what this means, because we are reading one of "Faye's books": he's going to talk at length about some subject, social or philosophical, with a slightly elevated language, and a kind of erudition that seems to emanate from Faye herself rather than any interior source. The interviewer proceeds to spend his allotted half hour doing nothing but this, and in the end, Faye isn't even given a moment to answer any of his extemporizing "questions." This is, I think, a little joke on us: Yes, Cusk says, I know the characters in my books all sound alike, and that they don't exactly sound like real people. You might be thinking, she continues, how tedious and long-winded all these people are, but don't worry, so am I. Yet, it might be the highest kind of praise to note that Cusk's characters, like Shakespeare's and Austen's, all sound like their author and yet are manifestly different. The arrogant interviewer may sound like the bedraggled man in the next airplane seat, or the autistic teen who leads the tour group, but he is clearly not like them. These are variations within the same music.

What sets Kudos apart from the previous two novels--though to be honest, I don't remember them all that well--is its interest in children. Everywhere Faye goes at the literary conference that forms the book's setting (in some sunny but unnamed southern European city), people are talking about their children. It's remarkable, actually, how many of the people in this novel seem to have children with autism or developmental delays, or just hobbled personalities and limited social abilities. On the plane, the seatmate describes at length his shock that his autistic daughter turns out to be an oboe virtuoso; a depressive but much-lauded writer at the conference describes his despair at the shallow-mindedness of his own son, who does nothing but watch soccer and eat candy. Children in Kudos are the locus of the struggle between father and mother, man and woman; Faye's interlocutors are constantly describing their divorces and unhappy marriages. And of course, they always have intelligent, discursive things to say about What It All Means.

I wonder if, going back to the former two novels, I would find that Faye disappears quite as completely as she does here. Faye really is the "invisible eyeball" of Emerson; she floats through the conference recording the discourse of others, only offering her own response from time to time, and much more briefly. (After the interview with the man, Faye is interviewed by a woman, who is forced to talk and talk about marriage and literature in the same way the man was because the sound crew needs to test her microphone--but not Faye's. This is, I think, another joke, another aware wink.) All this children talk made me expect some final climax that involves Faye's own children. And when it comes, it's rather muted: her son calls, desperate because he has gotten in trouble at a local pool thanks to convoluted events mostly outside of his control. Faye assures him that he's done the right thing, and promises he can come stay with her when she's back from the festival. It's a moment that is surprisingly simple and sweet--OK, we see that you are the novel's one good mother--and shorn of the heavy psychic drama that seems to lay over all the other struggles shared by parents in the novel. More shocking and pointed is the novel's final scene--the trilogy's final scene, which is kind of amazing, when you think about it--in which Faye goes for a dip at the local nude beach, where a male stranger locks eyes with her and pees in the adjacent water. Symbolism.