‘Transit,’ by Rachel Cusk

Reading British author Rachel Cusk is like following a trail of tiny diamond chips, then stepping back to discover the trail has expanded into a vast, glittering mosaic.

Oddly, the voice delivering this vision can sound close to robotic — measured, systematic, vacuumed of inflection, as if programmed to utter only strictest reportage.

Cusk’s ninth novel, “Transit” (the second of a projected trilogy, commencing with her superb “Outline”), posits a narrator, Faye, a writer of approximately Cusk’s age, who has moved to London from the country with her two youngish sons following the breakup of her marriage.

“Transit” is organized as a series of Faye’s conversations with individuals who crop up during her efforts to make a new life.

In succession, they tell their stories: a former beau, a hairdresser, the building contractor, his assistant, a writing student obsessed with the painter Marsden Hartley, the “Chair” (his only name) of a handful of authors arriving to speak at a book festival in some unnamed, blighted, rainy city.

Add in a hapless female friend too discombobulated for the fashion industry that employs her, another writing student compelled to rear a rare breed of dog, and a nameless, thoughtful man who provides momentary comfort to the racked and lonely Faye.

[...] perhaps most disturbingly, Faye visits a male cousin whose ersatz good life — in a new marriage combining children from prior marriages — quickly and horribly reveals itself to be riddled with resentment and dysfunction.

Here’s a gay youth on a beach in Nice, France, realizing his own budding identity: “He had felt both atomised and on the brink of discovery; both disappointed by what the world had revealed to him and in new, faltering correspondence with some of its elements.”

Or she considers those exotic dogs: “...[flowing] silently over the landscapes, light and inexorable as death itself, encroaching unseen and unheard on [their] targets ... [suggesting] that the ultimate fulfillment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves.”

Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood ... which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness.

The chilly accuracy of Faye’s gaze cannot completely mask a concurrent, almost grieving compassion.