There are a bunch of reasons why
Transit is a much more page-turning read than
Outline. It's definitely partly that there are more genuine interpersonal interactions (not to mention instances of actual dialogue), together with a greater semblance of an actual plot and narrative tension (via the building works, the horrible basement neighbours, Faye's relationship with her sons, and the hints of one or more romances). And I think it's also because Faye becomes more visible, which happens in a variety of ways, including through the reader learning more about her past, her perceptions of the world being more explicitly called into doubt, and the judgements other characters make about her (even if those judgements aren't always clear).
Like
Outline,
Transit encourages hermenuetic reading. Themes are woven through, often explicitly, but then developed only quite obliquely - most notably, fate, and, somewhat but not wholly separately, the relationships between parents and children - and are integral to the book. But I think it's the narrator's character and experience that are
Transit's main subject. There are specific little flickers and echoes from the earlier book - Faye's encounter with her ex-boyfriend Gerard who now "seemed somehow to have been filled in. In those days he was a sketch, an outline; I had wanted him to be more than he was", the large glass shopfront in Toronto that Gerard describes sounding very much like the cafe facade outside Faye's apartment in Athens, the black angel on its plinth in the neighbours' garden recalling the white glazed terracotta woman with her arms raised as if in benediction in the centre of Clelia's apartment, another chair tips over without obvious significance, another character comments on the way Faye always wears dark colours - but the deeper continuity is in Faye's worldview and its many absences.
In Faye's encounters, there is a recurring sense of people's characters being shaped and subsumed by others' desires and expectations:
- the pairing of the estate agent's understanding of himself as "a figure conjured out of the red mist of [his clients'] desire, an object, so to speak, of transference" frequently walked past by those same clients later without the slightest sign of recognition with Faye's subsequent encounter with him in the street when she carefully acknowledges him only for the agent to himself glance blankly at her (Faye's remark that "whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us" is characteristically able to be applied to Faye herself);
- the builder's comment that "he felt his clients sometimes forgot that he was a person: instead he became, in a sense, an extension of their own will";
- Amanda's recounting of her own lost years ("Sleeping with a man she would very often have this feeling, that she was merely the animus for a pre-existing framework, that she was invisible and that everything he did and said to her he was in fact doing and saying to someone else, someone who wasn't there, someone who may or may not even have existed. This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to someone else's solitude - a kind of ghost - nearly drove her mad for a while.");
- Faye's observation about her student Jane, which resonates with the wider project of these books: "I recalled her remarks about the draining nature of students and thought how often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed about others".
And the book is carefully constructed to elaborate on the implications; more than one child is there to observe the adults around them or be made subject to their flaws ("I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children were often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account"), there is building going on all over the place, Faye herself remains largely an outline albeit increasingly shaded in.
Repetitions build up, sometimes only once and in other cases multiply - musical instruments, dogs (somewhat like in Joy Williams' stories, as agents, objects and manifestations of cosmic forces and ripples), people not starting things because they know if they do they won't be able to stop. There are pointed lacunae, some of whose obscured parts (e.g. what Faye reads at the writer's festival) are later hinted at (i.e. Oliver being moved to tears by the description of a woman's pain he heard in that reading), and there's a thread relating to Faye's love life - a seemingly abortive flirtation with the chair of her writer's festival panel, the downstairs neighbours' accusation about her having had a man upstairs one night (its truth impossible to know), the date she goes on with an unnamed man (we learn his biological parents named him John, but not the name he now goes by) and the hint of heat and intensity near its end ("A flooding feeling of relief passed violently through me, as if I were the passenger in a car that had finally swerved away from a sharp drop"), the revelation (in the context of
Outline's and
Transit's overwhelming detachment, it arrives as a relevation) that Faye is blushing when she admits that she is going to the opera with a man (possibly the same one - she says only that she met him on the street).
Like in
Outline, there's a shocking outbreak of violence near the end, albeit relayed in recollection through conversation; in
Transit, it's between the narrator's two sons and thereby much closer to home while in
Outline, it was one of Faye's students' beating of her dog. And there's a remarkable final scene - Lawrence's dinner party - lit with memorable images (Eloise's son tearing her dress and revealing her breasts in her bra, "the row of weeping, incandescent children", the teenaged Henrietta's descent into tears over her biological father, Eloise's own crying) and built around an array of disastrous or merely imperfect parent and child relationships and interactions, continuing the book's kaleidoscope of fractured, non-nuclear and non-biological family units.
But the real climax, such as it is, arrives in the book's long final paragraph, which doesn't resolve the build-up of below-the-surface pressures that are literalised throughout
Outline - two separate sets of tree roots press up with enough force to break concrete pavement slabs, and the malignancy of the downstairs neighbours ("there was something in the basement, something that took the form of two people, though I would hesitate to give their names to it. It was more of a force, a power of elemental negativity that seemed somehow related to the power to create. Their hatred of me was so pure, I said, that it almost passed back again into love. They were, in a way, like parents, crouched malevolently in the psyche of the house like Beckett's Nagg and Nell in their dustbins. My sons call them the trolls, I said")
- but conveys an ambiguous sense of forward motion:
Through the windows a strange subterranean light was rising, barely distinguishable from darkness. I felt change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things, like the plates of the earth blindly moving in their black traces. I found my bag and my car keys and silently let myself out of the house.
