The name is Rachel Cusk

I have rather liked reading about an English novelist who is disdained in Britain but gives delight abroad, who has been compared (favourably) with Virginia Woolf, who admires DH Lawrence,who has written a book about childbirth that has prompted people to hiss at her from car windows, and who briefly joined a women’s reading group whose members she insulted before rapidly resigning.

She is Rachel Cusk, whose books I have been reading, and greatly enjoying, for some time, while knowing that it is an pleasure many other readers would disapprove of. But I appreciate her detachment, her powers of observation, her keen-edged sense of humour, her vocabulary, her command of figures of speech (even if she is conspicuously prone to overuse, however skilfully, the words “as though”).

I think her novels - including her latest, entitled Outline, about the narrator’s literary adventures in Athens and the people she encounters there  - unfold with fascinating precision and with a brilliant, if deliberately subdued, sense of surprise.

Best of all, perhaps, I have savoured her solitary travel book, describing a three-month trip to Italy with her husband and two young daughters, for its pointed responsiveness to whatever she sees and experiences, whether it is high Italian art or basic Italian food.

Yet, when Faber first published it, this book had to be pulped - for which she had to share the cost  - because it invaded the privacy of someone she met on her journey and he lodged a complaint about what she said about him (writers, I understand, have to be increasingly wary of this possible predicament, if someone claims he can be recognised by a perhaps indiscreet comment).

By good luck, having bought Cusk’s The Last Supper as soon as it came out, I have been able to read both the original and the reissued versions of the book, so have managed to work out, I think,  how she caused offence, though the reasons, to my eyes, would seem somewhat trivial, though admittedly perhaps riskily outspoken.

Nevertheless the episode has endeared her to me rather than the reverse. Yet Britain’s star  newspaper interviewer, talking to her afterwards  in The Guardian, complained that the book was “slackly written,” a verdict with-which I would wholly disagree.

But Cusk is now inevitably a controversial figure, who can arouse fury through what seems like  a mere handful of words. I shall continue reading her with pleasure until the day comes when I, too, am unforgivingly enraged by her. Somehow I do not see that happening.
13 May 2016