Rachel Cusk Won’t Stay Still
To access Rachel Cusk’s apartment in Paris, on the top floor of a narrow residential building in the Marais, you must first climb five flights of winding stairs. Once inside her place, you are confronted with yet another staircase, at the top of which runs a sleek corridor of rooms and a highly Instagrammable reading nook. From that level, there remains a final, minimal set of steps leading up to a loftlike living space, which gives way to a lovely terrace with unobstructed views that more than justify the effort needed to get there.
It is not every day that a writer you believe to be one of the greatest living novelists up and expatriates to a few minutes from your doorstep. In essay after essay, novel after novel, Cusk has demonstrated what the author Heidi Julavits aptly termed—in her review of Outline, the first in Cusk’s trilogy of innovative autofictional novels—“lethally intelligent” prose. Cusk’s is a literature of immaculately crafted observations, as aesthetically exhilarating as it is philosophically devastating. And I have a suspicion that this move to Paris—a city full of the sort of bourgeois social situations she captures with such punishing honesty—will yield something spectacular.
Equipped with sandwiches and berry tarts, I hopped on an electric scooter to visit her one Sunday this past summer. Cusk—who, at 55, is tall and slender, with straight brown hair that falls to her shoulders—answered the door wearing slim-cut denim and chunky white sneakers. There was the slightest
