Outline, the first in what might be called Rachel Cusk’s “Faye” trilogy, was such a seamless union of form and ideas that it left this reader marvelling at its discreet charms and radical achievements. In the space of one perfectly weighted novel, Cusk’s measured self-effacement served to make so much literary fiction appear almost pestering in its attention-seeking.

Instead of brandishing an omniscient voice, her narrator – Faye, a middle-aged divorced writer – was astutely passive, emerging only as a kind of enigmatic reflection in the characters she met and the stories they eagerly told her. It was as if more conventional styles of narration had been suddenly exposed as dubious varieties of mansplaining.

She repeated the feat with the coolly amusing Transit, in which the elusive Faye (although she shares some biographical details with Cusk, there is precious little self-description; even her name is mentioned only once in each book) moved into a grim house, was snogged by the chair of a literary panel, and remained a heroically attentive listener.

The final book in the series, Kudos, is set abroad, somewhere in southern Europe (though neither the city nor country is ever named), where Faye attends another literary festival. Dislocation, both geographical and emotional, is at the centre of the trilogy. Almost everyone Faye encounters is seeking a place in the world that life has in one way or another unloosened from their needy grasp.

The novel begins, like Outline, on an aeroplane, where once again the man sitting next to Faye unburdens himself of his life story. First time round, that set-up seemed to me a boldly captivating introduction to our quasi-absent narrator, (perhaps in part because the longest conversation a stranger has ever held with me on a plane is a request to get up so that she can go to the loo). This time, for all Cusk’s exquisite control, the exchange is more contrived, or at least less persuasively realised. Within no time, the man is recalling weeping helplessly as he listened to his daughter playing the oboe at a concert. When Faye asks him why he had cried, he says that he’d always been worried that there was something wrong with his daughter.

“I said it seemed to me people often found it easier to entertain that idea about their children than about themselves,” Faye tells us, in one of her rare but penetrating observations. Even though her fellow passenger goes on to articulate a pronounced masculine anger, he is positively reserved, really quite taciturn, in comparison with the testimonies offered to Faye at the other end of her journey.

While most of the characters in the trilogy have been blessed with an unnaturally eloquent talent for personal revelation, in Kudos the confessions attain a level of intellectual abstraction that makes them confusingly indistinguishable from one another. In the previous books there were small but important shifts in tone – for example, a hairdresser in Transit was thoughtfully perceptive, but his language and phrasing did not tower over his job. However, in Kudos everyone – a youthful city guide, a ski instructor, even Faye’s young son – speaks like George Steiner in therapy.

The novel is peopled by free-floating founts of intellectualism, struggling with the social shackles that paradoxically continue to bind them. It’s as if Cusk has wearied of the business of constructing characters in which to place her ideas, as though characterisation were itself a kind of stifling confinement.

Like her fellow novelist Deborah Levy, Cusk is aware that freedom is never free. In the discussions that Faye ignites as effortlessly as a chainsmoker lighting a cigarette, the cost that her interlocutors recount is a sense of identity.

Among many other things, the trilogy is a bravura interrogation of the social habits and assumptions that, assembled together, start to look suspiciously like a man’s world in which women just so happen to live. Is Faye long-suffering? Curious? Harried? Detached? Inscrutable? In an obvious sense these questions are beside the point, because she acts as the largely silent conduit through which explorations of personal struggle and the grappling for self-knowledge are told.

But her abnegation also carries a woman’s understanding of a certain kind of female invisibility. If we sense Faye’s critical appraisal of the men and women she meets, it’s conveyed through a kind of stoical impassivity in the face of a series of long, self-analytical monologues.

This one-way traffic reaches a satirical density when Faye is interviewed by several journalists in turn, all but one of whom spend their allotted time talking about themselves. It reminded me of those dreaded Q&A sessions at literary events in which members of the audience get up and deliver extended statements on their worldviews under the diaphanous guise of asking a question.

Although Cusk is far from a didactic writer (one of Faye’s interviewers helpfully performs the role of a feminist critic), she is intimately concerned with the architecture of women’s lives, the institutions and expectations – marriage, motherhood, loyalty – that continue to shape everyday experiences.

But Cusk is too sophisticated a writer to cast women as innocent victims. In Kudos they are more often collaborators and conspirators in their own subjection. No torch-carrier for female solidarity, Cusk once wrote a caustic, if entertaining, account of an all-female book group of which she was briefly a member. And one suspects there’s more than a hint of ventriloquism going on with the writer Faye meets, who notes: “It’s a saddening thought… that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it.”

The most conspicuous cause that Cusk has advanced in these three books is her already considerable reputation as a novelist. They stand as a landmark in 21st-century English literature, the culmination of an artist’s unshakable efforts to forge her own path.

Success, of course, brings its own challenges. This trilogy has been compared a little unimaginatively to the auto-fiction of Karl Ove Knausgaard. The two do, however, share the problem of where to go, having broken such fertile new ground. There were times in Kudos when I felt an authorial impatience with the form Cusk has so profitably unearthed, as though something gloriously fruitful was in danger of hardening into a stubborn conceit. But such nagging apprehensions were in the end extinguished by an unsettling and comically primal final scene that, like so much else in these books, will live long in the memory.

• Kudos by Rachel Cusk is published by Faber (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99