Rachel Cusk

Every word of this novel and the two before is different from anything else you've read, but subtly, not obviously. On the surface, you're learning what the narrator hears as she goes about her life and encounters various people, from passengers on planes to an old boyfriend, to the publicity person in this last book when the narrator, her career firmly established, is in (Portugal?) at a literary conference. People tell her their stories and she recounts them calmly, thoughtfully, without show more judgement, although sometimes you intuit that she believes the person is telling the truth, sometimes probably not, that probably they are rewriting the narrative to make themselves look better or victimized or powerful or simply acceptable to themselves. Almost always the atmosphere is calm, there is little drama. Even when there is conflict, the narrator tends to withdraw rather than confront. (One exception would be when her children, two boys, are at issue.) The narrator is divorced and now remarried, but her life is not under the microscope and while she mentions various experiences, it is only as they relate to the present moment. Under that smooth surface the book seethes. The sea is often present or a presence (sometimes in a painting, sometimes as a memory, sometimes for real), dangerous but embracing. Stop and think now. What is a woman in the eyes of men? In their own eyes as a result of not considering other options? A vessel. Passive. But also . . . dangerous. The sea. THE NOVEL MODELS WHAT WE DO AS WOMEN. Listen. Empathize. Absorb. Reflect. In this last novel the sea is a presence from which the town has cut itself off, building huge warehouses, docks, a fenced military post, so that one can only get to the sea by car. For a port to cut the people from the sea, is to cut them from nourishment. Pretty much every aspect of this novel that you choose to focus on will take you somewhere and I'm not sure I'm equal to the task of describing the effect the book had on me. It is, make no mistake, a meditation on what women experience, endure and suffer in the world of men. Through the course of the three books this becomes clear, not angrily, not resignedly, but acknowledged. Towards the end of this novel the woman who translated one of the narrator's novels says, after describing how her husband deprives her of even her child's respect, carefully and subtly and inside the law, "There is a passage in one of your books . . . where you describe enduring something similar, and I translated it very carefully and with great caution as if it were something fragile that I might mistakenly break or kill, because these experiences do not fully belong to reality and the evidence for them is a matter of one person's word against another's. It was important that I didn't get any of the words wrong . . and afterwards I felt that while you had legitimized this half-reality by writing about it, I had legitimized it again by managing to transpose it into another language and ensuring its survival." Another woman responds immediately, "We survive . . Our bodies outlive their use of them, and this is what annoys them most of all. These bodies continue to exist, getting older and uglier and telling them the truth they don't want to hear." (If you don't know your feminist legal history you won't fully get the point of this interaction. Never kid yourself for a nanosecond that the laws under which you live are written to protect "everyone". Made by men almost exclusively, the laws have been arranged to protect men. Even the smallest shift elicits a furious pushback.) The implications of the three novels, especially taken all together, are haunting, disturbing, thought-provoking, moving and, at the price of sounding bossy, important. This is not a simple novel to comprehend, and I expect many women won't want to take the plunge and most men won't touch it! The half-way reality. It's half-way because we don't want to see it as more than that. We know it's there. By the way, some men do get it, and they suffer accordingly. Brava Cusk. ***** show less

Outline by Rachel Cusk is a novel that rejects a conventional narrative structure, presenting instead a series of conversations experienced by Faye, a British writer traveling to Athens to teach a summer writing course. Rather than revealing directly much of herself, Faye becomes a conduit for the stories of others: a wealthy Greek businessman recounts the history of his several failed marriages, colleagues debate the nature of art and teaching while searching for meaning in personal show more relationships, and students disclose their private struggles and pet-related traumas. Through these layered dialogues, fragments of Faye’s own life—her recent divorce, her strained connections with her children, her struggles to find a sense of self—emerge only tangentially from the narratives swirling around her. Thus, the book unfolds less as a plot-driven story than as a mosaic of voices, each providing its own “outline” of the human condition.

I found Outline to be a stimulating and thought-provoking reading experience, if not one that was always comfortable or altogether enjoyable. The author’s writing is spare and elegant, and her stylistic choice to eschew usual character and plot development in telling a compelling story was a fascinating thing to witness. By the end of book, the reader does get a clear picture of the fractured and lonely world that Faye finds herself inhabiting, even if very few details of her personal history are ever revealed. (In fact, as the narrator of the story, we do not even learn her name until the last few pages of the novel!) While some readers will find this approach to storytelling to be invigorating, I imagine others will find the absence of a traditional narrative arc to be confusing and even, perhaps, off-putting. Still, this is an original work that pushes the boundaries of how stories can be rendered, which alone makes it a book worth recommending to any reader willing to accept that challenge. show less

In Rachel Cusk’s episodic novel, Outline, a British writer named Faye has been hired to teach a short-term course in creative writing at a school in Athens. We meet her on the plane to Greece, where she has been engaged in conversation with her seatmate, a Greek gentleman much older than her. During the flight, they share their personal histories, both of which include failed marriages and divorce. It is a probing, deeply confessional conversation, with the participants at pains to explain show more why their marriages fell apart. It is also a conversation which compels them to reflect upon decisions they’ve made and view the impact of those decisions from the perspective of their interlocutor. The novel proceeds through its ten chapters in this manner, with Faye walking the streets of Athens, going to bars and restaurants, engaged in lengthy conversation with a variety of characters—other teachers, an old friend, the Greek gentleman again, a famous novelist, a famous poet, her students—all of whom use their time in the spotlight to question and probe and speak loquaciously and revealingly about their lives and loves, their needs, their desires, their regrets, their place in the world, and what it means to be male or female, as the case may be. And along the way, through these encounters, the outline of Faye's story is gradually filled in. It will be evident early on that in Outline Rachel Cusk is not striving for the kind of narrative momentum or continuity, or even coherence, that we are taught in writing classes a novel must possess in order to keep the reader turning the pages. In fact, Outline is a novel that deliberately subverts that principle, and is instead built around what could be regarded as a series of random—or, perhaps, selected—encounters. The common factor throughout is Faye. Everything we see and hear is filtered through her consciousness: coloured by her personal experience, her needs, desires, responsibilities and life pressures. Her coolly analytic, cerebral, non-judgmental, sometimes ironic observations about life, marriage, the city she’s visiting, the people in whose company she finds herself, are relentlessly fascinating and endow the book with the forward thrust of a thriller. In the end, Outline seems to suggest that the act of constructing an identity to present to the world is largely futile because other people will determine who we are when they interpret the things we say and do. show less

Rachel Cusk’s darkly enigmatic novel Second Place describes the fraught relationship between a middle-aged woman writer (“M”) and a narcissistic, infantile male painter roughly her age or younger (“L”). The story begins years before the main action in Paris, where a youthful M encounters what she calls a “bloated, yellow-eyed devil” on a train and thereafter feels her life’s been contaminated by evil. The next day while wandering the streets of the city she happens upon a show more gallery where the works of a young artist who’s riding a wave of popularity are being exhibited. L’s work speaks to her in a way that acts as a salve for her experience on the train, and though her life at the time subsequently goes off the rails, she does not forget how L’s paintings helped her through. Decades later M is married to Tony, a nurturing, enterprising man very different from her hyper-critical first husband. Tony and M are living an idyll in a marshy coastal district. On their property are two dwellings: the proper house where she and Tony live and a guesthouse a short distance away through the trees that she calls the “second place.” M, not having forgotten how L helped her through a difficult period in her life, has written and invited him to stay with them in the second place. But L cannot immediately take up the offer, and the initial communication is followed by a bit of back and forth that leaves M uncertain if L will ever act on the invitation. In the meantime, M’s adult daughter Justine has arrived with boyfriend Kurt, and M puts them in the second place. But then L writes to say he is coming after all, and Justine and Kurt are forced to relocate to the main house. This sort of egocentric discourtesy is typical of L’s behaviour. Moreover, when he does finally show up, he’s brought with him, unannounced, a young woman, Brett—who, as it turns out, is much more civil and accommodating than her companion. The remainder of Second Place depicts a battle of wills. M simply wants to express gratitude by giving L a place to work in peace. But L seems resentful of M for reaching out to him and suspicious of her motives, as if he thinks her invitation implies that she expects them to forge an intimate connection. He responds to her generosity with hostility, keeping his distance from her, denigrating M in conversation, accusing her of being controlling and destructive. M narrates a brittle, incisive, psychologically devastating story of a problematic relationship in which the two parties never align. Paradoxically, the harder M strives to give L what she thinks he wants, the more defiant and disruptive he becomes. Cusk’s brief novel is in equal measures gripping and disturbing as it relates a taut cautionary tale illustrative of the saying be careful what you wish for. show less