Our morning priorities show us what we value. And what we value right now, it seems, is trying to keep our harrowed minds and bodies together, and to still give as much as we can of ourselves to the work our world demands of us. What more can we manage in a single morning’s work?
It is fitting that it be Cusk who should write a book that itself provides a resounding answer to questions about the philosophical potential of art. She has spent a career exploring and redefining the boundaries of narration and point-of-view in fiction while simultaneously demonstrating the ability of the novel to contain socio-cultural commentary within its artistic composition; in other words, uniting varying threads of her books within a coherent compositional goal that manages to be as precise as it is ambitious.
Rachel Cusk has always been dubious about the relationship between telling and being. Parade, her seventeenth and most recent book, opens on an artist named G, who, “because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down.” His “discovery of inversion” is so stunning that he is showered with plaudits, and even his wife, when she starts to feel overwhelmed, “simply inverts her surroundings and instantly feels a sensation of peace.” By painting the world right side up, your brain fills in blanks and makes assumptions; upside down, ambiguous shapes and shadows reveal themselves in their true form. Cusk, it seems, is familiar with the opposite game too—self-knowledge requires some critical distance.
At once a touching narrative about family and a gritty story about alcoholism, dementia, and longing, Fire Exit is a novel in which past and present are constantly on the page as we follow a man's life -- while it also entertains what that life could have been.