In June I went to hear author Lauren Groff on her book tour for her new short story collection, Florida. Someone in the audience asked her what she’d been reading, and she mentioned Rachel Cusk’s Kudos, and how she was desperate to find someone to talk with about the very specific image Cusk uses to end the book. I was also reading Kudos, and the next evening, intrigued by Goff’s comments, I finished it.

It turned out I had read the final scene before I had even started reading the book, in an essay about Cusk by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books.

Kudos ends, as it must, with the image of a man pissing into the sea. ‘He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more. The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes and I waited for him to stop.’ Immortalised here it cannot pollute her. She has had the last word.

All I had remembered about this scene from Lockwood’s piece was that the man pissing into the sea reminded me of Lockwood’s own father, a larger-than-life Catholic priest who is masterful in disguising his own cruelty with his larger-than-life-ness. He is the subject of her memoir, Priestdaddy, which I had read earlier in the year.

While Lockhart describes the ending of Kudos as “a man pissing into the sea,” I read the ending as a man literally pissing on Faye, Cusk’s narrator throughout the trilogy of novels that ends with Kudos. Or after re-reading it, perhaps men pissing on all women—the water that bore Faye up, heaving, being the sighing bosom of the long-suffering collective female—but that feels like an overreach.

Either way, the meaning of using that image seemed to me to be one of the least mysterious and unambiguous things about the entire trilogy, which consists mostly of Faye, whose name is only mentioned once in each book, recounting detailed dialogue of what other people—often figures with whom she’s having chance encounters, like a seat-mate on a plane—say to her. These conversations occur during a period of Faye’s life that encompasses both a recent divorce and a recent marriage, but as with Faye’s name, those big-life-events are barely mentioned.

Instead we spend most of the books submerged in a trance brought on by those long blocks of blankly dictated dialogue—variations of the word “narcotic” show up often in reviews of Kudos. Faye does respond to her interlocuters’ freakishly long monologues, but usually not in a way that provides many footholds.

Over the course of the trilogy, Cusk gradually dispenses with even the most basic signpost of her medium: chapters. In Outline, we find a table of contents with numbered chapters; in Transit we get unnamed and unnumbered chapters at conventional intervals; and finally, in Kudos, we have to make do with a single visual break just over halfway through the text.

Perhaps this general diminution of clues is why I so enjoyed trying to guess at all that remains unnamed, particularly in Transit and Kudos, including the literature festivals she attends in both, their locations, and the identities of the other writers who inspired the characters that are also there.

In Kudos, one clue about the location of the second half of the book’s events was a church that had burned down fifty years earlier and been rebuilt—but only on the outside. Inside remained completely, purposefully devastated, yet it was still in use as a place of worship. When Faye’s publisher, Paola, takes her out of their way to visit, it’s closed, and so we never hear Faye’s experience of the place, only Paola’s: “in certain places where statues had obviously been, new lights had been installed which illuminated the empty spaces.”

This material is rich with metaphors for how Cusk uses her trilogy to torch the narrative conventions—the religious icons—of the novel and illuminate new possibilities, as well as how Faye is largely accessible to the reader only through others. And yet I yearned for it to reveal something literal. A Google-search-facilitated scavenger hunt eventually led me to an ID: Igreja de São Domingos in Portugal. Others have identified a participant in the conference as a doppelgänger of Cusk’s fellow autofiction writer, Karl Ove Knausgård. Any tips on the Welsh novelist in Kudos are welcome.

While Cusk’s withholding of information practically prompts such diversionary expeditions for her reader, the imagery of the final scene is a subtler taunt. There’s nothing to decode in terms of facts. Lockhart’s spin on the pissing man has Cusk empowering Faye: “Immortalised here it cannot pollute her. She has had the last word.”

It’s a take that could be asserted for Lockhart herself in her gracious ending to Priestdaddy—in which she both accepts her father’s transgressions and acknowledges the perfection, the “idyll” as she calls it, of what she’s just experienced with her family—but I’m less inclined to this view of Kudos. After three books of absorbing the ramblings of others, being urinating on from inside the world’s biggest toilet is a blunt, even funny, encapsulation of Faye’s experience. Faye, after all, has had few words throughout. To give her last words now feels superfluous.

Jennifer Richardson is the author of Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Full Grown People, and Edible Ojai & Ventura County. She’s working on a lifetime reading plan app, @booketlistapp.