I admit that I liked Rachel Cusk before I had ever read her. It wasn’t the reviews lauding her work, including her latest, Giller Prize-nominated novel, Outline, nor was it the vitriol she received after publishing A Life’s Work (2003) or Aftermath (2012), which detailed with rare candour her experience becoming a mother in the former and divorcing her husband in the latter, that brought her to my attention, but instead an absorbing interview last year in the London journal, The White Review. After Cusk agreed with the interviewer that she considers herself a feminist writer, she is asked whether she engages in activism. She responds unequivocally: “No. I suppose Outline was true to myself: I don’t want to exist as an exterior person in the world. I really like writing, and increasingly I’ll become less visible.”
I asked myself before reading Outline whether my opinion of Cusk would prevent me from objectively assessing the book. While it is possible to hold opposing views on an author and their work, in the case of Cusk I wasn’t entirely sure that was possible. There are parallels between her fiction and her life, which she doesn’t deny, and in the case of A Life’s Work and Aftermath her life is the subject. Both Cusk and the narrator of Outline live in London, both are recently divorced, and the narrator’s purpose for being in Athens to teach a workshop on creative writing mirrors Cusk’s experience of teaching a similar class at the British Council in Athens in 2013. Would I see in the narrator of Outline only a reproduction of Cusk? What would I be overlooking? Would I read this a novel or a travel diary?
My concerns were assuaged when about fifty pages in I realized the narrator hadn’t really said much about herself. In fact, she hadn’t said much at all. I couldn’t expand upon the similarities between her and the author because I still didn’t have a complete sense of who the narrator was. On the plane to Athens she befriends an older man who with very little prodding goes on to tell her about his previous marriages. When she arrives she meets Ryan, a writer who is teaching the course with her, and at a cafe he explains how he deserves a holiday from his wife, shares his objectifying remarks about their waitress, talks about his family, reveals how he became a writer and commiserates over his lack of productivity in his writing before finally asking the narrator, ‘What about yourself, are you working on something?’ The chapter ends without a response.
Like Cusk’s own ambition, the narrator is barely visible, but very early on you sense that she is receptive to hearing what others have to say even if you’re not certain of the reason, aside from the general indication that she is searching for something. The few details we know of the narrator’s life—her recent divorce, her children and her writing career, sustained as it is by her teaching—seem to be presented in an almost arrogant way to tempt the reader into fruitless speculation.
In terms of plot, not much actually happens, and what does occur are interactions like these—in the cafe with friends, on a boat with the old man from the plane, in the classroom teaching her students—scenes where the narrator isn’t alone, where there are other people and where they can do the talking. And the stories they share are themselves outlines of possible novels not yet written. When the narrator (whose name, Faye, we only learn late in the novel) meets an old friend, Paniotis, for dinner, he tells a story of a failed trip he took with his children shortly after divorcing his wife. His reflections on the isolated nature of this incident from the overall story of their family can also best describe the narrative structure of Outline. “‘There is no particular story attached to them,’ he said, ‘despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing in our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to the story of who we were.’”
Despite the comparisons to Karl Ove Knausgaard that her blend of memoir and fiction often generate, I was instead reminded of Sheila Heti’s 2010 “novel from life,” How Should a Person Be? There are similarities between the narrator of Heti’s novel and Faye: both are writers, both recently divorced and both seem to be looking to others to learn something about how they should be living their lives. The difference is that Heti’s narrator is far more honest about her search—the book begins with the narrator asking the question, how should a person be? As a result, Heti’s narrator figures as a stronger and more active character than Cusk’s narrator, who she has positioned almost in marginalia and whose actions are determined by what everyone else seems to be doing rather than by any active searching on Faye’s part.
Her life is not quite her own. She is travelling to Athens because teaching is merely a way to make money. She talks to the old man next to her on the plane because he spoke first and befriends him simply because he asked. She listens to a successful writer prattle on about her newfound status because an acquaintance invited the writer to join the two of them for dinner. In the classroom, the one place where Faye has an overtly exterior presence, she is derided by one of her students for being a bad teacher because instead of leading the class through lessons or instruction, she steps back and has her students share their story ideas amongst themselves.
The restraint employed by Cusk in presenting such a minimal narrator, who is not always successful in her attempts to be inconspicuous to those around her, results in an unexpectedly absorbing novel that reminds us what can become of our reality when we’re looking for ways of being in the world.
‘Outline’ by Rachel Cusk
Book Reviews
I admit that I liked Rachel Cusk before I had ever read her. It wasn’t the reviews lauding her work, including her latest, Giller Prize-nominated novel, Outline, nor was it the vitriol she received after publishing A Life’s Work (2003) or Aftermath (2012), which detailed with rare candour her experience becoming a mother in the former and divorcing her husband in the latter, that brought her to my attention, but instead an absorbing interview last year in the London journal, The White Review. After Cusk agreed with the interviewer that she considers herself a feminist writer, she is asked whether she engages in activism. She responds unequivocally: “No. I suppose Outline was true to myself: I don’t want to exist as an exterior person in the world. I really like writing, and increasingly I’ll become less visible.”
I asked myself before reading Outline whether my opinion of Cusk would prevent me from objectively assessing the book. While it is possible to hold opposing views on an author and their work, in the case of Cusk I wasn’t entirely sure that was possible. There are parallels between her fiction and her life, which she doesn’t deny, and in the case of A Life’s Work and Aftermath her life is the subject. Both Cusk and the narrator of Outline live in London, both are recently divorced, and the narrator’s purpose for being in Athens to teach a workshop on creative writing mirrors Cusk’s experience of teaching a similar class at the British Council in Athens in 2013. Would I see in the narrator of Outline only a reproduction of Cusk? What would I be overlooking? Would I read this a novel or a travel diary?
My concerns were assuaged when about fifty pages in I realized the narrator hadn’t really said much about herself. In fact, she hadn’t said much at all. I couldn’t expand upon the similarities between her and the author because I still didn’t have a complete sense of who the narrator was. On the plane to Athens she befriends an older man who with very little prodding goes on to tell her about his previous marriages. When she arrives she meets Ryan, a writer who is teaching the course with her, and at a cafe he explains how he deserves a holiday from his wife, shares his objectifying remarks about their waitress, talks about his family, reveals how he became a writer and commiserates over his lack of productivity in his writing before finally asking the narrator, ‘What about yourself, are you working on something?’ The chapter ends without a response.
Like Cusk’s own ambition, the narrator is barely visible, but very early on you sense that she is receptive to hearing what others have to say even if you’re not certain of the reason, aside from the general indication that she is searching for something. The few details we know of the narrator’s life—her recent divorce, her children and her writing career, sustained as it is by her teaching—seem to be presented in an almost arrogant way to tempt the reader into fruitless speculation.
In terms of plot, not much actually happens, and what does occur are interactions like these—in the cafe with friends, on a boat with the old man from the plane, in the classroom teaching her students—scenes where the narrator isn’t alone, where there are other people and where they can do the talking. And the stories they share are themselves outlines of possible novels not yet written. When the narrator (whose name, Faye, we only learn late in the novel) meets an old friend, Paniotis, for dinner, he tells a story of a failed trip he took with his children shortly after divorcing his wife. His reflections on the isolated nature of this incident from the overall story of their family can also best describe the narrative structure of Outline. “‘There is no particular story attached to them,’ he said, ‘despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing in our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to the story of who we were.’”
Despite the comparisons to Karl Ove Knausgaard that her blend of memoir and fiction often generate, I was instead reminded of Sheila Heti’s 2010 “novel from life,” How Should a Person Be? There are similarities between the narrator of Heti’s novel and Faye: both are writers, both recently divorced and both seem to be looking to others to learn something about how they should be living their lives. The difference is that Heti’s narrator is far more honest about her search—the book begins with the narrator asking the question, how should a person be? As a result, Heti’s narrator figures as a stronger and more active character than Cusk’s narrator, who she has positioned almost in marginalia and whose actions are determined by what everyone else seems to be doing rather than by any active searching on Faye’s part.
Her life is not quite her own. She is travelling to Athens because teaching is merely a way to make money. She talks to the old man next to her on the plane because he spoke first and befriends him simply because he asked. She listens to a successful writer prattle on about her newfound status because an acquaintance invited the writer to join the two of them for dinner. In the classroom, the one place where Faye has an overtly exterior presence, she is derided by one of her students for being a bad teacher because instead of leading the class through lessons or instruction, she steps back and has her students share their story ideas amongst themselves.
The restraint employed by Cusk in presenting such a minimal narrator, who is not always successful in her attempts to be inconspicuous to those around her, results in an unexpectedly absorbing novel that reminds us what can become of our reality when we’re looking for ways of being in the world.
HarperCollins | 256 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN# 9781443447102