Charlotte Grimshaw on the selfie novels of acclaimed English writer Rachel Cusk.

Rachel Cusk’s previous novel, Outline, was a narrative experiment that followed her divorce memoir Aftermath. The author’s voice – her world view – was so strident and solipsistic in Aftermath that she was accused of being a “brittle little narcissist.”

In Outline, Cusk played with the concept of invisibility, creating a central character, a writer called Faye, who was a silent listener, a mere outline herself. It was a novel of passive witnessing in which Faye was barely present except as a recipient of other people’s stories, and it read like Cusk’s creative response to the critical aftermath of Aftermath, symbolic of a vanishing act, or a passive-aggressive device by which the author could disappear yet subtly and powerfully assert herself. If it was a reaction to the accusation of narcissism, it couldn’t have been more interesting, even if the reading required a certain suspension of disbelief.

Outline is entirely made up of Faye’s encounters with strangers who, on meeting her for the first time, relate their life stories to her in intricate and writerly detail. It’s implausible that stories would unfold as first person narratives in this way, yet the accounts are compelling enough to sustain the artificiality of the device: Faye meets stranger (seated next to her on a plane, in a classroom) and silently listens as the person articulates a fully-formed short story.

Faye’s circumstances are similar to Cusk’s own – she is separated and living apart from her children – and the stories include encounters with writers and discussion of their autobiographical work. It’s a novel about writing, where the narrative is accompanied by a commentary on the creative process itself. Beyond each stranger’s story is silent Faye, beyond Faye is Cusk, whose creatively oblique stance manages, in the context, to “speak louder than words.”

RACHEL CUSK NOT LOOKING ESPECIALLY BRITTLE BUT HARD TO TELL

In the new novel Transit, Faye is living alone and working as a writer in London. She has no contact with her children, except when they phone her in distress. She retains her magic ability to elicit complex, neatly shaped life stories from strangers she meets in her daily routine: her builder, her hairdresser, her pupil.

Attempting to establish herself in a new life, Faye has bought an old house and is trying to have it renovated. The interior is in a squalid and depressing state. It’s impossible to be comfortable in any room, the floors and walls are rotting, and the basement flat is occupied by troglodytes, a couple so aggressive, deranged, ugly and noisome that Faye thinks of them as trolls. When the trolls are not abusing their ancient dog, smashing broomsticks against their ceiling and defaming Faye to the neighbours, they’re poisoning the atmosphere with their cooking, sending a vile stench throughout the dwelling.

The trolls are so grotesque they seem symbolic – of Cusk’s anger perhaps. If the house is a metaphor for the mind, just look what she’s got seething in the depths. It’s a stark portrait of discomfort and alienation, a tour through the writer’s unquiet mind. Perhaps, on some level, Cusk is sick of Faye’s silent, passive listening, and is yearning to burst out and make some noise. But she’s trapped in her own fictional device. This is the central interest of the writing, that it interweaves compelling narrative with an implicit observation of itself. In this, Cusk is an absolutely contemporary practitioner, a writer for the selfie age. If Transit’s central narrative stratagem, Faye’s passive listening, doesn’t really work, that’s not the end of the story. To a certain extent, it is the story.

Transit (Jonathan Cape, $37 ) by Rachel Cusk is available at Unity Books.

Is there any such thing as privacy in the age of social media and smart phones? Exciting new YA thriller novelist LJ Ritchie talks to author Nicky Hager about the realities – and unjustified fears – of state surveillance.

 LJ Ritchie: One question that often comes up in discussions on surveillance is, “If I’m not doing anything wrong, why should I care who sees me?” And one of my favourite responses to this is from author Cory Doctorow, who describes watching his young daughter at play, and noticing that she took far more risks in her make-believe when she wasn’t aware he was watching. Although there was nothing wrong with either mode of play, the knowledge that she was being watched encouraged her to conform to what she felt was expected of her. What are your thoughts on the effects of surveillance beyond policing “wrong” behaviour?

Nicky Hager: The claim “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear” is like a slogan from a police state. I agree with the writers who say that privacy (like freedom of speech) is an essential part of a person being able to develop their personality and beliefs. It’s as crucial and fundamental as that. Privacy is about being able to develop a sense of self, about being able to develop our ideas (making mistakes, changing our minds) and about figuring out our relationships. Sometimes it is about very private things that we want to keep secret: family problems, sexuality, special likes and dislikes, and fears and hopes that gradually make us who we are.

I know as a writer on intelligence that most people by far aren’t being spied on. But if the idea or fear is around that our lives aren’t private, it undermines this vital stuff about who we are. (Also, by the way, the loudmouths who say “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear” would actually be enraged if their privacy was breached.)

Ritchie: A common metaphor for the modern surveillance state is the panopticon  an 18th century idea for a prison in which prisoners had no way to tell when they were under surveillance, so would have to assume they were always watched, and police their own behaviour. Some argue that this model is now obsolete, and we are now in the era of the “panoptiswarm”. They say that surveillance technology is so widely distributed – in the form of camera phones and other consumer products – that it no longer makes sense to imagine a model in which a central authority figure watches everybody, because now everybody participates in the watching, as well as being watched.

Do you think that the widespread availability of recording devices represents a democratisation of surveillance, or does it still end up reinforcing traditional power structures?

Hager: Surveillance isn’t being democratised. Or only a little bit. It mainly accentuates inequalities of power.

Ritchie: What do you think is the role of fiction in shaping public understanding of surveillance? I see surveillance presented most often in crime dramas on TV. These shows rarely address issues of privacy – the targets are presented as criminals, and we are not expected to extend them empathy. The users of surveillance tools rarely misinterpret the information, or make mistakes. This reinforces a popular understanding of surveillance as a moral tool. What aspects of surveillance would you like to see addressed more often in fiction?

Hager: Let me say what stories about surveillance I would like to see less often in fiction. The first of these are ones showing surveillance as vital to protect against super-evil: stopping the fanatical terrorists from blowing up the commuter train etc. etc. These stories essentially re-run intelligence agency propaganda, which claims that the primary purpose of mass surveillance systems is to get the bad guys. But this is not true. Most intelligence collection by far targets political, diplomatic and economic intelligence, or military targets, in competition and conflicts between nations. That’s what they do. Talking about terrorism is largely a cover, so they don’t have to justify what they really do. Thus, the fiction is perpetuating unhelpful propaganda.

But the fictional pictures of surveillance I dislike most are ones that make it seem that everyone is being watched all the time: CCTV cameras, satellites, monitoring of the Internet, huge databases of everyone’s lives…especially in a country like New Zealand, this just isn’t true. If you have a P lab, or an Arabic name and write angry letters to John Key, someone might be taking an interest in you. But luckily nearly everyone isn’t being watched, so I hate it when fiction combined with careless media discussion creates fear for ordinary people that doesn’t need to be there.

This brings us back to the subject of privacy. It is awful if people wonder needlessly whether someone is reading their private email, or decides they’d better not be involved in politics, or generally shrinks down and limits who they are because of an unnecessary fear of surveillance. Because, unfortunately, the fear that we’re being watched does almost as much damage as the reality would.

LJ Ritchie is the author of the newly published YA  thriller, Like Nobody’s Watching (Escalator Press, $24.99). Set in Wellington, it’s about a kid who uses his school’s surveillance system “to seek justice for the bullied and the downtrodden”.

The Spinoff Review of Books is brought to you by Unity Books.