Yet Atkinson’s exceptional reader-friendliness has always been a Trojan horse, a way of delivering something pointed in the guise of something smoothly familiar. The very form of her work, while consistently inventive within its traditional frame, trades on a kind of nostalgia, and that nostalgia often correlates with the novels’ content it seems no coincidence that Cusk’s recent “ Kudos” is set explicitly in the Europe of the Brexit era-fearful, ugly, divided-while Atkinson’s books often hark back to the days of the Second World War and the Blitz, when plucky England came together as one, and triumphed in a European conflict that ended six years before Atkinson was born.
In the twenty-odd years since her prize-winning début, “ Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” Atkinson has predicated her enormously successful career upon giving readers intelligent and artful iterations of what they already know they like: made-up Johns and Janes, in realistically described settings, enacting a plot that’s not only ingeniously constructed but, in the end, fully resolved. One could do worse, then, than to think of Kate Atkinson as a sort of anti-Cusk. I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.” “Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. . . . Any new British novel at this particular moment must emerge, it seems, in the shadow of Rachel Cusk, whose just completed trilogy of austerely philosophical autofiction reflects her repudiation of the novel’s traditional building blocks-character, plot, description, etc.-as “fake and embarrassing,” as she told an interviewer.
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