Outline: A Novel (Outline Trilogy, 1)

Rachel Cusk has done something quite amazing with this novel: she has simply let you into the mind of a writer and shown you how a writer finds and absorbs material. Each chapter begins independently, as if it's a new short story (which it is, in a way), and the novel is finally not quite circular but more like a spiral. If this doesn't sound very appealing, I'm not describing it well. The narrator goes to Athens to teach a short writing course and extracts stories from the people she interacts with: mostly tales of their own lives, but also of their families, their work, and their ideas. Sometimes the characters tell the stories themselves, as in the devastating portrait of Angeliki, a successful well-heeled Greek writer whose confidence is as off-putting as the complete hopelessness of the defeated Englishwoman Anne. Some stories continue beyond one chapter, such as that of the narrator's seat neighbor on the flight from London to Athens, who strikes up an acquaintanceship with her and invites her to go out on his boat. The narrator's story is always in the background, a bit shadowy, a bit sad, but never the focus. She is at work, absorbing material. Because the narrator's job is to teach a writing class, soon we have stories within the story. The students each tell a short incident on the first day, and are revealed almost entirely through their responses. The next day they bring in stories, and we have the somewhat jarring experience of having these described -- stories by characters who are themselves stories in the narrator's mind . . . It is a fascinating look at an artist's perception of life. And to reinforce it all, we have references to ancient Greek stories, opera, music, painting -- the many ways that artists have found to represent life, such as the musician in a concentration camp composing a piece of music based on the song of the birds he heard while incarcerated, or the playwright who disastrously discovered that she could summarize any work of art in one or two words, and thus no longer needed the whole piece. I am an admirer of Rachel Cusk's work, but I realize that this novel may not be for everyone. The writing is beautiful, with an often hypnotic quality. If it had been an Ian McEwan novel, somebody would be lying dead at the end; there was that sense of being swept along in someone's vision without any confidence in where it might be headed. At times, I felt as though I were reading a description of someone's dreams (except much more coherent than mine); other times, I was taken aback by the level of detail in the description, as in this moment when the narrator prepares to ride out to an island with her airplane companion on his boat: "He asked me to take [the carrier bag] while he made the boat ready, and then he crossed the pontoon and getting down on his knees drew a length of sodden rope out of the water, with which he proceeded to pull the boat attached to the other end toward him. The boat was white, with wooden cladding and a bright blue canopy. There was a large black leather steering wheel at the front and an upholstered bench seat along the back." Surely, we think, something extraordinary is going to happen that will require us knowing these details. It doesn't. Other reviewers have mentioned Virginia Woolf as a comparison, and the narrative voice -- so strong, like a current carrying you along without a doubt; struggle is useless -- does have a good bit of Clarissa Dalloway. But I don't really think that this novel is about the action, or even about the stories that the characters tell. It is about how to get the material for one's own story. It is, in narrative form, an outline.

What do we know about the narrator of Rachel Cusk's novel? Her name is Faye. She is a writer. She lives in London and is divorced. She is the mother of more than one child. She has taken a job teaching a summer writing course in Athens. That's about it. We never get below the surface with her. She remains a cipher. This cipher, however, seems to have the ability to inspire other people to reveal their deepest secrets. Throughout this very unusual and very intelligent book, Faye has a number of conversations with people that she encounters and all of these people end up telling her stories about themselves and all the people they are closest to in their lives. Her first encounter happens on the plane when she is flying from London to Athens to take up her summer job. She sits next to an older man, a Greek who is returning home. He unburdens himself about his failed marriages. Initially, he mentions only two but we learn later that he has actually had three. He talks about his children who have various problems. The conversation will continue in Athens when he contacts Faye and takes her out on his boat a couple of times and eventually makes a pass which she spurns. But there are several other encounters; with her students in the writing class; with fellow writers; with people whom she meets for coffee or for dinner. Always these meetings turn into confessionals with the other person revealing intimate details of his/her life to Faye. All of these conversations are reported to us in the voice of Faye, the observer and writer. Faye shares several characteristics with the author and it is tempting to see this as a kind of memoir. It is difficult to tell where the line is drawn between autobiography and fiction. Somewhat curiously, while these people's stories are told in Faye's voice, we almost never hear that voice as a part of the conversations. She's simply telling us what the other person said, but she's not saying much about herself or voicing her opinions. Hers is a disembodied voice and she remains a cipher. Even her family - the children she left in London - seem to factor only very minimally in her day-to-day life and to have no impact on her interactions with others. So this book is a collection of conversations. It is reporting on an intellectual level. Very little emotion is involved. And yet one feels an intimacy in these interactions that might not have been present if the stories were told emotionally. The reader has a clear-eyed view of the encounters and is able to make up her own mind about them without being prompted by the author. This is one of the more unorthodox books that I have read in a while. In fact, I can't think of another that is quite like it. Perhaps the closest was Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. I thought the writing was brilliant and inspired. It certainly was original in its concept and execution. I've learned that this was the first in what is planned as a trilogy. That's very good news. I look forward to reading the later entries.

I found this novel to be beautifully written, but at the end unsatisfying. The writing is a real pleasure: sharp, precise, and rich with insights large and small about the way people act and feel. But for me at least, the material did not live up to the quality of the writing, because it did not draw me in to someone else's life. The narrator presents herself in outline only -- "a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was". This does give the reader lots of interesting stories about other people -- "all the detail filled in around it". But for this reader at least, neither the blank nor the stories of other people's lives were compelling enough to draw me in. Caveat lector: the fact that I couldn't get into this novel, of course, may say a lot more about me than about the novel. One reviewer compared the writing to that of Virginia Woolf; to me shame, I have never been able to "get into" Ms. Woolf's books, except for "Orlando". Those who love Ms. Woolf and other writers of similar rarefaction may well love "Outline". Those who love "Middlemarch" probably won't.

I know opinions are divided on this but I am an enthusiast, I found it brilliant. It's about a woman spending a week teaching a writing class in Athens. But the woman is not there. Rather she is "outlined" by the many people she encounters who share their stories with her. In this way her "loss of identity" around some hidden "incident" or "crisis", some "breach" is shadowed forth. It all reminds me of Hemingway's "iceberg" theory, where what is suppressed in the writing will still find its way to the reader's mind and heart. And it does. But there is so much here, not just this woman's story in "outline"... but how life experience and story interact, angles of observation and perception are explored around inversions reversions reflections mirrorings lapses and breaches in which story and the making sense of story, experience, and life itself are all questioned. This book is bursting at the seams with ideas insights and observations and with real or ghostly emotion - there is a haunting haunted quality to the book - as it is with people (I don't want to call them characters!) and stories. It is a book which will bear and repay rereading I have no doubt. I found it gripping and enthralling all the way through.

What happens when a novelist travels from Britain to Greece to teach a week-long summer course on writing? Not a whole hell of a lot, yet this is the breadth of Rachel Cusk's Outline, the first part of a prospective trilogy of introspective novels. Fear not, there is a quite a lot packed in these pages. The narrator, Faye, is a very good listener and we are treated to all she takes in: from her neighbor, an older gentleman, on the plane; from fellow workers, friends, students in her class. All have interesting stories to tell. A chorus of sorts. As far as the narrator's own story goes we only superficially learn that something has befallen her (divorce?, horrible accident?). Her children are mentioned, a husband, but it's all clouded in so much London fog. Not until we begin to see Faye's experience revealed through other peoples stories - perspectives - and her reactions to them does the reader get the sense that Faye is lost; not so much holding back as not knowing how to portray herself any longer. One night, she dines out with a colleague and one of his clients, a newly successful novelist named Angeliki. Faye soon gets an earful on the subject of women's identities in the family structure: "‘For many women,’she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days. My own mother lived through me in a way that was completely uncritical,’ she said, ‘and the consequence was that I came into adulthood unprepared for life, because nobody saw me as important in the way she did, which was the way I was used to being seen. And then you meet a man who thinks you’re important enough to marry you, so it seems right that you should say yes. But it is when you have a baby that the feeling of importance really returns,’ she said, with growing passion, ‘except that one day you realise that all this –the house, the husband, the child –isn’t importance after all, in fact it is the exact opposite: you have become a slave, obliterated!'" We start to get the idea, a hint, of the shape of Faye's life as she tentatively befriends the older gentleman, her neighbor on the plane trip over. He invites her out for an excursion on his small motor boat (downsized from a yacht, post divorce). While swimming she spies a family on another nearby vessel; children diving into the water, the mother in a sunhat reading a book, the husband pacing on the deck speaking into his cell. Faye reflects: "I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own. When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was the more real?" Though part of a cycle, Cusk does not leave Outline open-ended, rather she pulls it together, closes gaps and circles back. Faye meets the woman who will replace her at the summer school and will be staying in the same time-shared apartment: Anne. Anne relates an incident of her own, and in so doing reveals an experience similar to Faye's in which she strikes up a conversation with her neighbor, a diplomat stationed in Athens, on the flight to Greece: "He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline , with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was." Thus the author forces Faye to blatantly confront her own malaise, that which can only be revealed through other's stories, borne vicariously through other's lives; mirrored by how other's see the world, leaving an outline to be completed.

On Rachel Cusk The critics agree that Cusk is a brilliant writer, a master of minimalist prose, and a success in stripping the novel of its pretensions of plot and character. What they don’t mention is that this pretentious project is a bore that appeals to over-intellectualized critics and academics desperate for something new to write about (after all, how much more is there to say about Shakespeare or James Joyce, et al.?). This novel consists of a series of conversations at diverse venues in Athens in which the named characters apostrophize the narrator with psychophilosophical reflections on their assorted affairs and marriages (a considerable number of them are serially divorced). There are occasional bon mots, such as “increasingly he found other people bewildering” (so true!) and “he is a person of extremes and prefers not to be detained by facts” (we all know someone like that). But these are diamonds in an awful lot of low-energy coal. Frankly, this book reads more like a series of essays on how awful it is to be a cosmopolitan bourgeois literary intellectual than anything that can be called a novel without stripping that term of any meaning.

The author has written a novel that is mostly conversation, but it only makes sense if you read her like an omniscient third person. She has complicated thoughts and deep revelations, very interesting, but odd when it is expressed in conversation. No one talks this way, (except perhaps the author). And everyone in the book talks with this same voice.

This one will play with your head a bit. It starts with a plane trip to Greece where she (unamed) will teach a writing course for the summer. She never gets a seatmate's name during this very curious novel and she refers to him as her "neighbor" all through their very personal story. The really weird thing is that she really hit home with me and I thought she had a spy in my life. Ms. Cusk is brilliant, really brilliant at times. You will reread some of convoluted sentences a few times before realizing why it was written with so many words, but she refines and refines until she sees a scene or a relationship, etc., with an electron microscope. I loved the stories she tells as well as those of her students. I think you will find the story about Sylvia very similar to her own story. The perception she has of her "neighbor" changes remarkably from beginning to end though I still question why she got involved with him in the first place. A fascinating approach to the novel. A novel novel, you could say. I was confused at times, especially when the narrative changes narrators, but, over all, a very enjoyable group of stories within her story, and how she got so personal I'll never know. A good read. Keeps you on your toes Sometimes her couplets are awkward

Some bits were really nice. On the whole it was ok ok. Was expecting more somehow as a highly recommended book.

So refreshing! I'm so pleased that the publishing industry has embraced this unusual novel, and that it has enjoyed such high praise. It's an unconventional structure with no real plot to drive the momentum forward, and yet I whipped through this thing at breakneck speed. Granted, it arrived 5 hours before my book club was due to discuss it... I actually would have like to savor it more slowly. Ever since my discovery of Sandra Cisneros's 'The House on Mango Street,' I've been intrigued by this concept of non-plot or loose plot. But I hadn't yet seen a protagonist who only reveals him or herself through encounters with others, counterbalanced. In this sense, Rachel Cusk really delivers. One conversation in particular describes a character emerging through the filling in of background until the photo-negative version of the person appears. In the case of 'Outline,' we never get enough background filled in to allow the protagonist to fully emerge. In fact, she refuses to emerge, but I didn't resent the refusal one bit, as she essentially confesses her desire to remain passive -- a non-person, as it were. We don't even learn her name till page 211. Faye. (Not Rachel, tempting though it is to assume 'Outline' may be a fictionalized autobiography). There are plenty of details about Faye's colleagues and neighbors and students fully described, but our protagonist remains a mere outline. It's clear she's going through some sort of transition, a difficult time during which she wants to forget a prior version of herself or recreate an updated version. She takes a few risks that twist the novel's tension up a notch or two, but mostly, it's a very passive character we see navigating this liminal period of one particular week in her life. She is both passive and blunt -- quick to speak her mind and ask a difficult question in pursuit of the elusive authenticity she seeks. There are frequent references to performance versus authenticity and to the veneers people create to earn attention of would-be lovers, employers, and so on. Wonderful observations about love, lust, family power dynamics, and marital discontent sparkle on every page, as do the vibrant descriptions of the heat and blue waters off Greece. Cusk is praised for her daring originality. It is indeed an unusual and strangely satisfying book of hints and teases. I think the reviewers, myself included now, are perhaps a bit self-congratulatory about their courage as well. I understand that this is an unusual intro to her work, and now I can't wait to delve into her earlier, more standard writing.

I read this for school purposes, and as a result I’ll read it again. There’s quite a lot here, not just in its unique writing style that I am unaware of which if it holds any place in her previous works — it’s jarring at first, the blending of her use of quotation marks and freeform in terms of conversation (which is essentially what this book is, a series of conversations) — but it soon settled in my mind and no longer inhibited my reading experience. But I found myself going along, going along, until I would come across a line that to me was absolutely brilliant. As a result, I consider this book a very interesting character study on not just the narrator (who herself has caught my interest in countless ways, not just for her quite, listening nature — we don’t learn her name until most of the way through the book), but everyone else she meets, individuals who exist in various levels of selfishness and narcissism, filled with moments that stop you in your tracks, force you to step back and say, “Wow. That’s something else. That’s incredible.”

Todo un placer leer este libro. Voy a comprar los otros dos de la trilogía.

OUTLINE, da inglesa Rache Cusk, não poderia ser um romance mais sincronizado com as narrativas do nosso tempo, aquelas que se dão pela disputa. Como indica o título, o romance é composto de pequenos “esboços” do que poderiam ser outros romances centrados em diversos personagens. A protagonista e narradora é uma escritora inglesa, em Atenas onde ministra um curso de escrita criativa. Ao longo dos capítulos, essa mulher se encontra e interage com diversas pessoas – desde o homem da poltrona vizinha no avião até seus alunos. Cada encontro é um capítulo e uma pequena história que pode ser uma biografia ou apenas um episódio da vida desses personagens. É a polifonia de um coro grego que estrutura a narrativa. Aos poucos também descobrimos mais sobre essa protagonista, mas tudo nas entrelinhas. E assim se dá o romance de Cusk sobre a pós-modernidade na qual narrativas disputam o centro do palco, mas nenhuma é forte o bastante para ser a vencedora. Nem a da narradora/protagonista cuja própria narrativa é a um fiapo que serve como substrato para as demais. É nessa fragmentação com começo, meio e fim que temos uma visão do presente: período de incertezas e inseguranças.