Faye in the Outline trilogy roved from Athens to Germany, her inner monologue as precise and elegant as an obituary: “It may be the case that to find that home is to end one’s quest,” she says in Kudos, “but it is with the feeling of displacement itself that the true intimacy develops and that constitutes, as it were, the story.” The tasteful home is the place where Cusk’s protagonists have the illusion of control and it’s frequently the place they must leave. Her fictional heroines always seem to be traveling, making their homes loom large by their absence, like something repressed. The subject of real estate is a provocative and generative one in Cusk studies. The protagonist is a landowner, after all, and her huffs and puffs over everybody’s misbehavior on her turf-her literal turf, when you consider the marsh-show a relationship between her wish to control her daughter and her wish to own the landscape that inspires a great artist when she’s not busy being a great artist. (“Does catastrophe have the power to free us, Jeffers?” asks Cusk’s narrator.) But we learn nothing at all about this second Jeffers, and so the form of address reads like a send-up of the epistolary novel more than an epistolary novel, with the ridiculous name of her confidant evoking a chauffeur or some other aristocrat’s professional acquaintance. Lawrence, Lorenzo in Taos, which is addressed to a person named Jeffers. As if unsure how to control the pitch of all this emotion, Cusk has borrowed the novel’s rough conceit from Mabel Dodge Luhan’s novel about D.H.
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