His pride and joy is a handsome dog, a Saluki, a breed renowned for its grace and ability to follow instruction and act as one with its pack. Once she has gotten her workshop student to speak, we discover that he is not just the innocuous, empty bumbler being dominated by a fellow student that he first appears to be.
Many of the things she finds out are strange and striking. At first, we might be forgiven for imagining that her central aim is satirical: to expose the many quacks and mansplainers who cross her path and the quirks of contemporary life that come to mind. This is because everything in the novel is filtered through Faye, and Faye is as funny and moving and ruthlessly articulate as she is good at paying attention. If this sounds like a recipe for sleep soup, rest assured: It is anything but. But speak and speak and speak they all do. Still others, like a group of women Faye encounters at her cousin’s house, require something resembling ongoing engagement from Faye to continue speaking. With others, like an initially reticent male student in Faye’s creative writing workshop, a bit of prompting at the outset is required and then a story pours forth. Sometimes, as in the equal parts hilarious and unbearable case of a logorrheic fellow writer named Julian, the speakers are already blabbing away when Faye encounters them, and all she has to do is sit back and let them talk. Indeed, as in Cusk’s last novel, “Outline” (2015) - set in Athens, and also narrated by Faye - the majority of this hypnotizing new offering is composed of the sometimes pages-long speeches of Faye’s interlocutors, who seem, once they have started talking, either unwilling or unable to stop. As she goes about rebooting her life, she listens to contractors, builders, old boyfriends, cousins, hairdressers, students, fellow writers, panel chairs, real estate agents, prospective love interests and more.
Faye, a writer, has recently returned to London with her two sons following a divorce. If listening is an art, then the narrator of Rachel Cusk’s new novel, “Transit,” is a virtuoso.
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