Wordings like a “vow of obedience was broken” make her sound adulterous even before she starts relating to Clytemnestra.

(Cusk’s first marriage lasted less than a year-a scrapped draft.) Reviewers mostly hated her for writing it, perhaps because it evinced what William Gass called the pettiest of human desires, the desire to be believed, even as she declined, in passive and high-flown language, to say what happened. ( Instructions given to the babysitter, likened to preflight safety demonstrations, have “a certain pointlessness.”) Her third, Aftermath (2012), a treacherous account of separation and divorce from her second husband, the father of her two daughters, became a more cautionary tale about ambition for feminists. Her first memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), tested the market for female fatalism. The author of Faye’s life is Rachel Cusk, who since the age of twenty-six has been publishing books-mostly fiction-every two years on average and is now fifty-one. Mostly she listens while other people tell their stories, interrupting but seldom to make the stories clearer-more accurate and pure-in her retelling. A writer herself, she “makes appearances” at literary events to promote her work, but we aren’t shown these appearances. Transcendence is the only explanation, because what happens in the novels’ time is strictly material, grounded in an urbanity that seems predictable until nothing really “happens.” Faye, over the course of the trilogy, teaches writing for money, applies unsuccessfully for a loan, renovates the house she can afford, goes for lunches, dinners, walks, dyes her hair a new shade of brown. Why must we be in this stifled, banal environment, with no room to think? How long do we have to sit here? The air cools, dims. At first, for several pages, it’s hard to relax. Passenger flight explains these incredible novels.

She was reading a spam e-mail from an astrology service predicting “a major transit.

She boarded, after lunch with a billionaire, another airplane at the start of the first novel, Outline. FAYE HAS JUST BOARDED an airplane when Kudos, the third novel in a trilogy about her middle life, begins.

Kudos by Rachel Cusk