Susan Johnson

She's a very cool writer.

You're right.

But that's why I think that that kind of strange withholding power that the writing has makes it even more powerful.

You know, it's a bit like Elizabeth Strout's Lucy Barton.

The power of that book is all the withholding too.

And I think Cusk has that same ability to withhold, but it just, it kind of makes the emotions more compressed, like they're in this box and they...

Yeah, yeah, I think so too.

So I do find it the most emotional of her work and, in fact, much more emotional than memoirs.

My feeling of reading her books over a long period of time is that she's now found the ability to sort of somehow meld

her intellectual life with her emotional life.

I think that's why it has so much power, because I think she's certainly one of the brightest writers working today.

These books almost approach works of philosophy, really, don't they?

I found that really irritating, actually, I have to say, because I kept trying to work out where it was, which sort of distracted from the book for me.

I really wish you'd said it somewhere.

See, I thought it was Italy.

And then, you know, so it's really... There was a very intricate description of a national tart.

Oh, was there?

Yeah.

You know, just getting back to reading the books as like kudos, as a standalone, I think it's really,

to my mind, the least successful of the three of them, partly because of that not placing it in a place, but also it seemed to be, to me, a bit more fractured and a bit more fragmented than the other two.