New York Times Book Review of Rachel Cusk’s “Transit” says narrator/protagonist has identity issues, as does Cusk in “The Anorexic Statement.”

Today’s rave, front-cover, New York Times book review by Monica Ali acknowledges that Transit is neither plot nor character driven, and that the narrator/protagonist is “an absence”: 

“Transit is a novel that all but dispenses with plot…What, then, is to be done?…Cusk’s answer is…a shadowy narrator, Faye —named only once…

“…she is…in many ways, an absence…There is…no whole and centered inner self to which we are introduced…Where other novelists have looked ‘deep within,’ Cusk seeks to rise above the ‘I’…

“To render a protagonist with the traditional brush strokes of personality, habits, motivations, desires and so on, may in the future and in comparison come to seem like a child’s finger painting” (1).

After reading the above review, I looked online and found Cusk’s essay, “The Anorexic Statement,” which also raises identity issues.

The Anorexic Statement

“…Is it disgusting to be a woman? Menstruation, lactation, childbirth, the sexualisation of the female body…In becoming female she must cease to be universal, and relinquish the masculine in herself that permitted her as a child to find the idea of these things disgusting indeed…

“…the observer — the male…

“A personal admission: not long ago, in a period of great turmoil, I lost a considerable amount of weight…I was unaware, inexplicably, that it had happened. That my clothes no longer fitted passed me by: I noticed it only because other people told me so. They appeared shocked…At first, I was startled in return…

“As a teenager [she is now a 45-year-old mother of two] I had been tormented by hunger and by an attendant self-disgust…I had a monster inside me…I learned to manage the monster, more or less. Like the first Mrs Rochester it had a locked room of its own, from which it sometimes succeeded in breaking free to rend into shreds my fantasies of femininity…I was accustomed to fantasy and to the safety — albeit uncomfortable — it supplied, and the notion of an integrated self was the most uncomfortable fantasy of all…while wanting more than anything to be feminine, I had only and ever found my own femininity disgusting…” (2).

To form my own opinion, I will read more Cusk in future weeks.

1. Monica Ali. Review of Transit by Rachel Cusk. New York Times Book Review. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/books/review/rachel-cusk-transit.html?_r=0

2. Rachel Cusk. “The Anorexic Statement.” NewStatesman, 31 October 2012. http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/2012/10/anorexic-statement