In her memoirs, Cusk had puzzled away at the problems of existence in a way that sometimes seemed haughty, as when in 2009’s The Last Supper she attributed her restlessness as a young mother in Bristol to her sensitivity to the legacy of the slave trade.
Cusk had only ever had one, highly wrought, arch style, which could easily seem mannered (“assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface” she once wrote, of pizza), and had never produced easy, natural dialogue: now, as Faye reported page after page of speech in that same rapid, surmising style we not only heard the conversations but received a powerful sense of feelings muted and talked over. Now she dispensed with all of that: Faye apparently imposed nothing on the world she listened to others talking and presented their monologues linked only by the power of imagery and voice.
In her novels, Cusk had never been comfortable with complex, long-form plots, but at the same time was doggedly intellectual, intent on foregrounding ideas: earlier the strain, in the queasy satire of Arlington Park and essay-like stasis of The Bradshaw Variations, had been showing.
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