Real Talk: Rachel Cusk's Kudos

A character in a novel — a woman named Faye who seems in many ways to resemble Cusk — keeps meeting people who may or may not be "real" (that is, based on "real people") and whose real or invented stories all center around the subjects that most concern the novel's protagonist. [...]Cusk manages to write three novels about travel, marriage, divorce, motherhood, home, freedom, domesticity, and so forth while making it sound as if the novels are being stitched together at random, constructed from the narratives of characters whom the protagonist just happens to run into. More than once he had seen the organisers proudly lead a group of delegates outside — where chefs were cooking fresh fish and great skewers of squid and prawns on enormous braziers — in order to take photographs of the scene, before being returned inside to face the same meagre panoply of soup and cold cuts they'd been offered the day before. The conversations that Faye has — with fellow writers, with her editor and her translator — are nearly all about violence (one author describes a village harvest festival, held during his mother's time, in which children were encouraged to slaughter animals with knives, picks and shovels) and first-person accounts of women being bullied and threatened by men. Another woman confesses to fearing for her life because of a violent ex-husband, a professional sailor she refers to as "the Buccaneer," while yet another recounts how her former husband repossessed the family car, so that now she has no way (other than by bicycle or on foot) to get to work or take her son to school.