previous Cusk experiences resulted in your idea of cusk as: don't know, can't understand the excitement, neither positive nor negative. plus, probably she's rather dodgy, this coming from reading her seriously misinformed and careless anorexia article from a couple of years ago (rejoinder here). dodgy not as in malice, sort of rather: wow this is so wrong it's not true but somehow there's an earnest naivety in it so one can't be too cross, it's not intentional, so it seems to you, it's just simply: are you for real? someone going off into some own tangent which one observes from a distance in perplexity, sort of: what? ok well go on ahead then and don't bother me. you recall her divorce book has pissed off a ton of people. you couldn't understand why. you thought it was exceptionally reticent compared to the usual suspects. then there was the reproach that it was pretentious because of the greek references in it. you didn't understand this either. the greek references weren't out of the ordinary, familiar to everyone who had that stuff at school. so to speak cusk is not anne carson. you don't see at all why her novels are called overintellectualized. why all the fuss you wondered. then there were those articles of her in support of knausgaard, nothing too surprising as well. you didn't agree with her reasons and found them unconvincing but you could see why someone like her likes someone like knausgaard. you read a few of her novels. you finished arlington park which you didn't like. some you didn't finish.
in short, your irritation with cusk is rather an irritation about why she's the cause of so much irritation, because each time you look for what ever is supposed to be offending you can't find anything (except that aforementioned anorexia essay). but you can't find much you like either. just somehow stuff in the middle. maybe ok maybe not nothing too exciting. move on. or not.
you thought it was one of those british things that you don't understand: middlebrow irritates the hell out of middlebrow. surprise. and? (is there something more to it or not). and you're too old to think irritation (and you don't think irritation is her intention) is worth it just for the sake of shaking up some people whose favourite author is ian mcewan. really, what else is there to do.
the question is of course: why can't you stop following what she's doing. and you thought that it's because she does follow her own tangent. most of the time in directions you don't find interesting but - who ever follows her own tangent is worth being followed in some way, if possible. not sure you can do that. but it's worth doing it per se. her anorexia essay a good example, you disagreed, you thought it was wrong and badly factually misinformed and prejudiced, and yet, as an own exploration of any given topic it is worthwhile if it's more than an exercise and you feel her stuff is more than an exercise, there's something genuine about it even if most of the time you weren't convinced. then on the other hand you're not always sure.
you saw her recent book outline in an oxfam and thought: ok then.
Perhaps it was because I had begun to see the virtues of standing still. p 113
outline
and that was something entirely else. you did really like it. this was really interesting you thought, this was the real thing, hunting the good old ineffable. more of this please and less of the previous stuff.
something very convincing in its letting go (and it would be important to look in more detail in how far this book is so different than her previous ones...), it convinced where in so many instances it wasn't convincing at all. not to you. and it remained that way, from the first page to the last. the style reminds of kertesz, the way the sentences are build. the kertesz of kaddish for an unborn child. and lives are being told. there is distance in cusk's writing, not the detached distance, but the necessary one. the one coming out of the experience that everything escapes so that the important things can come to stay.
what's being let go of: artificiality, plot, the idea of literature as having to convey something is given up upon, literature not as persuasion, as something to keep to oneself instead. and that non-persuasion frees for the real thing. writing not necessarily has to be about something. plot is not of paramount importance. questioning the self. you said earnest naivety, and maybe that is a requirement for that very innocence that is being sought.... and also found in this book, so you like to think...
As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition - I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything. p 19
What I miss, Ryan said, is the discipline itself. In a way I don't care what I write - I just want that feeling of being in sync again, body and mind, do you know what I mean? p 48
I thought the whole idea of a 'real' self might be illusory: you might feel in other words, as though there were some separate autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn't actually exist. p 105
I would like, she resumed, to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity and no associations. But how such a thing could be accomplished, and even where such a place might be, I have no idea; not to mention the relationships and responsibilities themselves, she concluded, which drive me mad but at the same time make escape from them impossible. p 157
I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unremarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying - it seemed to me - was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequence had become - to put it bluntly - anathema to me. p 170