It’s addictive, sharing such a strange, bright vision of the world and Kudos, this final part of the Faye trilogy, has been eagerly awaited. This was thrilling because Cusk allows us so near to Faye because we feel we almost are her, seeing from her dark centre. In Transit she also falls, reluctantly, in love. It continued Faye’s artful/artless listening but took on Cusk’s intellectual and feminist concerns too, delivering memorable accounts of a literary festival where Faye is talked over by male writers and groped by the chairman, yet retains a cool, forlorn integrity and of a funny, sad, posh dinner party where Faye observes the febrile modern family. Transit, published in 2016, was even better. Cusk was always armoured, barbed, rebarbative: Faye let us see what a brave, gleamingly truthful writer she could be. Cusk had never, even in her memoir of birth, owned up to an awkward female body of her own Faye had no reflection, either, but seemed merely unselfconscious. Cusk’s fine feminist anger had always contended with alienating, visceral spasms of horror at other women – “witches” with “grey” teeth, older mothers with “fat, freckled arms”: but Faye sat with and talked with as many women as men.

In contrast, Faye spoke rarely but directly about herself and even told stories about pets and children.

She struggled with self-disclosure, veering between over-frank revelations that got The Last Supper sued and coy, high-minded lacunae. 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.

Cusk trilogy