"Transit" by Rachel Cusk

An audio book

Framed essays and colourfully idiomatic monologues with illustrative anecdotes. Not much about the main character - a single mother (writer) with 2 sons. She receives a horoscope that she knows is computer generated hoax, but she pays to read the details anyway. She's returned to the city after being in the countryside for years. Cities (unlike the countryside) provide structures and standard templates so people can describe themselves in fewer words. An estate agent expounds his theory about who buys what - a creative personlike her should buy a dump.

She sees an ex, Gerald (now a father), by chance. He never moved away. He knocked down all the internal walls in his place. She gets builders to provide estimates for soundproofing the dump she's moved into. The neighbours below in the basement complain about the noise, swearing at her repeatedly. The builder says the clients don't notice he's there after a while. The boys stay with their father while work is done.

Her hairdresser thinks that adults are children in disguise. He doesn't know why some try so hard to change their appearance.

She's a guest at a book festival. A gay co-panelist Julian, deprived of love as a child, theorises about why people write. After, the chair accompanies her to her hotel and kisses her aggressively. She gets away.

A 39 year-old female student who she's tutoring is in her flat. She relates to a US painter who made himself difficult to love. She wanted to sleep with a famous photo-journalist in Paris, but he turned him down.

. The narrator has phoned the chair, asking to have a drink with him. Another builder talks to her. Polish, he designed and built his family's house. His father didn't like that the big windows let people see right through it. That's when he left for England. Gerald also liked living in such a house.

Her friend Amanda started going out with a builder. A 6 week paid job became a free one that's taken more than 2 years so far. She'd worked in the fashion world, unknowing self-delusion.

A student had driven to France to buy a dog from a German woman who'd started liking dogs in Egypt. A theory of consciousness emerges.

During a first date with an adoptee who had wanted to inherit his father's tool she says that it's "as if living were an act of reading, finding out what will happen next". Having builders in somehow disrupts that stability.

She goes to a dinner party where parents bring kids. She observers the kids and also meets a 40+ Swedish mother. Parenthood is studied - how a man might become a different sort of father after remarrying. Someone realises that his life was a sequence of attempts to merge with something or someone else - something that could be internalised. Someone says that fate is a purer form of truth. At the end she "lets herself quietly out of the house".

She's observant of signs of aging. A person has young skin "like a fold in a curtain that remains unfaded". "Amanda had a youthful appearance on which the patina of age was clumsily applied as if, rather than growing older, she had merely been carelessly handled"

Themes include - Truth and freedom; Rebuilding a house = rebuiding a life; Paris as hope.

Other reviews

• Helen Dunmore
• Tessa Hadley
• Daniel Aureliano Newman (Transit won’t thrill everyone: it will enrage those expecting plot, and it may unsettle those expecting a straightforward depiction of family drama and self-discovery. But many will read it with the breathless exhilaration it deserves. ... Part of the effect is due to Cusk’s handling of mood and tone, a skill she shares with Kazuo Ishiguro. She also knows exactly how to let a sentence unfold. Erudite but never grandiloquent, Cusk writes so well it’s easy to overlook how experimental her method is, and how profound her insights. Few novelists so deftly manage the Big Questions.)
• Christie Watson (the view in the distance was a women’s prison. On a clear night, “the tips of the prisoners’ cigarettes could be seen as they smoked on the walkway along their cells.”)