Kudos is the final novel in a trilogy by Rachel Cusk that includes Outline (2014) and Transit (2017). Faye narrates each book. She has suffered some unnamed trauma that annihilated the life she lived previously, and from the outset presents herself as a kind of void. The novels consist of a series of one-sided conversations: Faye meets people who deliver what are essentially monologues about themselves, each presenting a miniature treatise on the self, the family, memory, the nature of truth, and marriage. In Kudos, Cusk asks what holds a life together. Is it narrative? A greater sense of justice? Or simple delusion? Into the empty space of Faye Kudos pours its ideas.

These conversations do not read like natural speech. There are no pauses, few adverbs, and, most notably, few interjections by Faye. Some of the dialogue is in quotation marks, but most is rendered as indirect speech (“It was true that a hamster meant nothing to her, she said, since they had a no-pets policy in their building…”). Faye does not parse this speech; she just reports.

Even though we do not hear much from her directly we somehow learn a great deal about Faye. She speaks to a publisher, because, like Cusk, she has been published. She is in a hotel doing a press junket, because she is a writer. There is a phone call from her son. But for the most part Faye is absent. The question of why she isn’t there is one of the core mysteries of the trilogy. Has Faye (or Cusk) edited the heroine out? Faye’s absence reads like the self-abnegation of a soul trying to atone for something. On the other hand, it also reads like the primness of a control freak who owns the narrative voice completely by putting it into an eerie vacuum of her own making. Whatever the case, something has been removed, either through the stylings of a novelist or the dysfunction of a character’s mind. It’s either emotional or artistic erasure.

The speakers form concentric circles around Faye, each leading closer to the core, like the canals of Amsterdam or the circles of hell. The first person in Kudos is a man, a total stranger. He is extremely tall and cannot keep his limbs out of the gangway of an airplane. His struggle for freedom is a figure for male pain. “He had read somewhere,” Faye reports, “about a medieval method of punishment that involved incarcerating the prisoner in a space specially designed to prevent him from being able to fully extend his limbs in any direction, and though just thinking about it made him break out in a sweat, it pretty much summed up the way he had lived.”

The tall man is rich and retired, though young. The tale hinges on the death of a dog named Pilot, onto which the tall man has projected his identity. The dog is “probably the most important member of their family,” more important than the children. The tall man beats the dog to make it behave. When he secretly puts the dog down, to put it out of its misery, the tall man “realized then that [he] had done something awful, something they would never have done, something so cowardly and unnatural and now so completely irreversible that it felt like [he] would never, ever get over it and that things would never be the same again.” As he digs the dog’s grave he begins to feel “that this actually was what it was like to be a man”—strong, angry, burying the self he has murdered. He cannot get the mud out from under his fingernails.