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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