What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn’t really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life.

Transit –

It’s definitely not quite right to say that Transit picks up where Outline left off, because it definitely doesn’t. It IS interesting to try to decide what Transit picks up from if anything at all. Outline, if these books do connect the same narrative across multiple texts, was about a writer and various other voices in and around a literary event and conference. Now, this book is much more situated in real life. I say real life because conferences take on a kind of life apart from real life. Read enough fiction, see enough movies, or go to enough conferences and you undertand the weird kind of temporariness they occupy and how that temporariness allows for a suspension of everyday life to occur.

This book involves the disconnected voice of our narrator moving into a new house in a “questionable” neighborhood and having to answer for the kind of unexpected and unplanned elements of life that surround affairs, second marriages, displacement of nontraumatic origins and the new stages of life that these changes usher in. A complete disruption of plans to say the least. This novel traces this narrator and the various other people in her life as they navigate (mostly through the medium of consideration and thought — as opposed to direct plot and action). I have to imagine that one’s connection or non-connection with this book falls pretty squarely on one’s feelings of the first book. I found it easier to connect with the experiences of this one, or more so that the experiences were more approachable, if the specific kinds of writing you find here aren’t so much.

(Photo: https://earthyphotography.co.uk/rachel-cusk/)