Rachel Cusk, _Kudos_

CAN THIS REALLY be the end? If so, it ends on an unnerving note, Faye swimming in the ocean as a naked man on the beach locks eyes with her and pisses "a golden jet" into the sea.

The novel begins with a conversation with an airplane seat mate (shades of Outline) en route to a literary festival (shades of Transit). The festival in Transit was just one chapter, however, and in Kudos the festival occupies the whole book. My best guess is that the festival is in Lisbon (a European capital by the sea, steep hills, jacaranda trees). The festival's--any literary festival's--task, as one character puts it, is "the attempt to make a public concern out of a private pastime," the writing and reading of books.

Ordinarily, writing and reading are solitary activities; Kudos is about the economic and social bustle that goes into the commodification of those activities: the translators, the editors, the publishers, the festivals, the panels, the interviews, the prizes (kudos is Greek for "honor")... and let's not forget the patronage. One of the writers Faye meets has recently been a guest of what sounds a great deal like the Santa Maddalena Foundation (see Tomaz Salamun's The Blue Tower), and it does not sound like she enjoyed herself.

Once again, the novel's attention is chiefly on the stories Faye is told by the people she meets, some of them new acquaintances, some of them longtime associates, and one of them someone we have already encountered (Ryan from Outline, who in the meantime has had a great publishing success that has not made him more likable). The tone (it seems to me) is more satirical than in Outline or Transit, probably due to the setting, which seems to encourage posing. In Kudos, Faye seems like a Lillian Ross or a Janet Malcolm, someone who can keep people talking long enough to hang themselves with their own ropes. Several of the people on the novel are supposed to be interviewing Faye, but they always end up dissecting themselves.

It's the summer of the Brexit vote, but that topic does not come often; Faye has remarried, but we learn even less about that. (Once again, Faye's name occurs in the text exactly once, p. 227).) The novel carries a feminist ground tone, though, expressed not so much by Faye as by several of the women writers she meets, some of whom seem a little self-important, but who collectively create a discernible change-has-gotta-come mood. The whole festival--especially the long mid-day meal scene, pp. 123-66--does sometimes seem simply a pissing contest among prickly male egos. Maybe that is what the final page is about.

This is the third novel I've read in recent years that prominently features a book festival (counting Outline and Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers, partly set at the Frankfort book fair) and so far none has given me the slightest inclination to attend one.

Can't believe Kudos is the last one. I'm saddened. We should at least get to meet the new spouse, I think. The man from second-to-last episode of Transit, do you suppose?