Rachel Cusk, Kudos

- Cusk’s style as an objective observer, particularly her ability to render conversations and everyday domestic stuff she hears and sees, is sublime. The stories are interesting and ordinary at the same time, and the prose sparkles. 
- Her method is observation not interpretation, and raises the question as to the extent of any critique that might be going on. The meetings are presented as serendipitous but they are obviously not. This is fiction and the author is in full control. 
- There are no chapters, no parts. It’s one continuous listening and telling, with a fair bit of mansplaining and self-aggrandisement. Many of the stories are personal, about marriages, children and family dramas. I haven't done an exact count, but my sense is that most of the women are sympathetic while most of the men are misogynist.
- the single frustration I have with Cusk’s ‘novels’ is their resemblance to short story collections slung together by a slight and artificial connecting story line. In this novel it’s a weekend away to attend a writers festival. Even the location is not disclosed (possibly Portugal - there are tarts!). That’s not a sufficient enough hook. And most of the characters are obsessives and stunning bores.
- This is a ‘non-novel’. Deliberately so. One character, Sophia, says this about a prize-winning novelist Luis’ subjects:
‘Domesticity, Sophia said very earnestly, and the ordinary life of the suburbs, the ordinary men and women and children who live there. These were things, she reiterated, that most writers would consider to be beneath them, pursuing instead the fantastical or the noteworthy, gathering around themes of public importance in the hope, she didn’t doubt, of increasing their own importance by doing so. Yet Luis had trounced them all with his simplicity, his honesty, his reverence for reality’.
- But in Kudos the ‘realism’ isn’t really real at all. The very articulate and sophisticated tales and confessions of the story tellers are fictional constructions. They don’t reflect real conversations. It’s artifice.
- One male character is a literary critic. His views on the ‘literature of negativity’ and the ‘triumph of the second-rate, the dishonest, the ignorant’ are telling. ‘He had deduced from my work that if I had an imagination I had the sense to keep it well concealed’. This surely is Cusk’s self-assessment. 
- The final image of the huge black bearded naked man urinating into the water near where Faye had entered is classic male arrogance.
- There is a strong dimension of female subjugation throughout. This is Cusk's essential point.