The ingenious, circuitous sentences and tumbling ensembles of metaphors in Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes don’t always succeed. The ostentatiously constructed texture of the narrative occasionally rattles, but it is clear from her debut novel that Cusk’s depiction of modern life is dark, uncanny and penetrating.

I’m sufficiently far from my twenties to recall only a pervasive heaviness from the sense that decisions made at this time may prove consequential. Close enough to childhood to be haunted by lost security and protection, but inhabiting a strange transitional, not quite fully adult phase when one’s identity is diffuse and exploratory. Reading Saving Agnes is to peer through Cusk’s filter–we are a similar age–at this elusive and inchoate period of life.

In her review of Transit, Tessa Hadley refers to the sheer force of personality in Cusk’s writing; flowerville writes, “why can’t you stop following what she’s doing. and you thought that it’s because she does follow her own tangent. most of the time in directions you don’t find interesting but – who ever follows her own tangent is worth being followed in some way, if possible”. Perhaps its this inimitable quality that draws me to Cusk’s work as well. This originality is clear even in this debut novel.

Twenty years later, the fluidity and looseness of Saving Agnes is replaced with the intensity and straightness of Outline and Transit; the circumlocutory sentences of Saving Agnes are austerely pruned, but common to all three books is the melancholic atmosphere and attentiveness to the nuances of human interaction.