Outline, published in 2014 – the same year Self issued his eulogy for the novel as a medium – found Cusk revitalizing the novel form by ostensibly retreating from the mechanisms that traditionally drive it. “I do want to find a different kind of fictional voice.” “The thing with narrative is that it’s like suburban sprawl: it just goes on and on and on,” says Cusk on the phone from the U.K., where the Saskatoon-born author has lived since 1974. The men – and they are mostly men – bemoaning the demise of the novel as a form capable of communicating subtle psychological nuances to a general readership seem to have been too busy claiming it has become irredeemably moribund to notice Cusk has been on the forefront of reimagining the novel’s potential and, in some cases, its very constitution – a project that continues with her latest, Second Place (Harper Perennial). Many fine novels have been written during this period, but I would contend that these were, taking the long view, zombie novels, instances of an undead art form that yet wouldn’t lie down.”įortunately, Rachel Cusk didn’t get the memo. Will Self, writing in The Guardian in 2014, proclaimed grandiosely that the novel “should have been laid to rest at about the time of Finnegans Wake, but in fact it has continued to stalk the corridors of our minds for a further three-quarters of a century. At least, that’s what readers have been told for pretty much as long as novels have been around.

Rachel cusk novel