I love Cusk's writing. It is simple, powerful, and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions. She is a passive instance of something I would not even call a narrator; she is rather a witness to people's stories, who so happens to instantiate the unfolding.
However, the ending was pretty weak.

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"There were various points of gold around his person, a fat signet ring on his little finger, a chunky gold watch, a pair of glasses on a gold chain around his neck and even a flash of gold when he smiled, all immediately noticeable, and yet I hadn’t been aware of any of them during our conversation on the airplane the day before. That encounter had been, in a sense, immaterial: above the world, objects didn’t count for so much, differences were less apparent. The material reality of my neighbour, which up there had seemed so light, was concretised down here, and the result was that he seemed more of a stranger, as though context were also a kind of imprisonment."

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"Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of."