Outline

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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

This unusual novel by Rachel Cusk raised several questions as I read it. What does it mean to be a writer? Why and how do you listen to your surroundings? Does that listening mean participation in the lives of those around you? There are undoubtedly more questions to pursue, but these are certainly central to the story told about a writer who, on her way to teach a writing seminar in Greece, meets several people with whom she has conversations. The conversations gradually tell us more about her as they do about the people whom she meets. We are able to consider the unawareness that our seeming ignorance leads us into. The narrator comments:
“Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of show more 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.”
Consideration of the questions that this book raised for me suggested a way to "make the effort to understand" the world within and without the story.

We learn about many things including her dreams and her epiphanies or realizations about herself. One conversation with a Greek man, Paniotis, yields the following:
"I realised that my little dream of a publishing house was destined to remain just that, a fantasy, and in fact what that realisation caused me to feel was not so much disappointment at the situation as astonishment at the fantasy itself." (p 95)
Learning about herself she is able to teach other writers at the seminar and we are able to learn something about ourselves--perhaps.

This is not a novel driven by plot. Nonetheless the simple elegance of the writing and the fascinating conversations--sometimes seeming like short stories embedded within the larger novel--make this a rewarding book to read and reread. I found it a different but welcome addition to my reading life. show less

I thought this was a phenomenal book and one that has left a lasting and important impression on me. Of course, I'll need to revisit. There are just too many delicate phrases, too many layers of metaphor. I found myself wanting to jot down lines every few paragraphs. This is a novel which left me feeling, ironically, solicitous about its array of characters. Each one is almost not okay, but probably fine, in a way that gave me a persistent touch of anxiety.

There is an icy tone in the narration but I don't think this sort "pictures at an exhibition" type of work would be more effective any other way. You need that cold distance to feel the discomfort that comes with seeing a person's psyche so clinically splayed.

A British author travels to Athens to teach a week-long writing workshop. She recounts what happens on her trip, including a boating excursion, dinner conversations, and her students’ contributions to the workshop. There is little plot. The protagonist becomes the foil by which the other people – friends, traveling companions, colleagues, students, and strangers – reveal themselves. We see them lie and then try to recover. We hear them discuss some fairly deep subjects on a wide variety of topics about their lives.

The author has a way of describing a single event in almost microscopic detail. It reads like a series of short stories, tied together by the trip to Greece. I wondered where this book was headed, and finally decided it show more provides an “outline” of the protagonist. She never self-reveals, but we get a feeling for her character through her responses to others. I particularly appreciated the writing tips embedded within the stories. Readers of experimental literature will likely enjoy it. show less

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 show more 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. show less

The main character of Rachel Cusk’s novel, Outline, identifies the Agora as her favourite site in Athens. This ancient market place of goods and ideas quietly symbolizes the narrator’s role as a conduit for those around her to speak. From her neighbour on her flight to Athens where she will be teaching a writing workshop, to her students, to her writing colleagues, Cusk’s narrator seems preternaturally open to letting her interlocutors take the lead. She is not shy about providing frank criticisms (though not of her students), but for the most part she just lets people speak. And thus we get a series of narratives told by others or reported by Cusk’s narrator. These stories or proto-stories are typically reports of some incident show more in the life of the speaker (they do not originate as “fiction”). Some of these are brief and some are lengthy. Many involve accounts of the dissolution of a marriage. Many involve trauma in some form. Most touch on forms of love, a kind of symposium if you will. Through these narrations, Cusk’s narrator’s time in Athens is measured out. Indeed we know more about her through the kinds of stories people tell her than through any other means. And although she too sometimes speaks publicly — one of the ancient purposes of the Agora — she is usually brusque, providing little more than a summary of her own life situation.

I was mesmerized from the start. This is thoroughly excellent writing akin to the stylized semi-autobiographical prose of Sebald or Lerner. It challenges the reader to forego the novelistic norms which we rely upon and to reconsider what a novel is and what it can achieve. For me, that is perhaps the highest achievement for any novel.

Certainly recommended. show less