book review outline rachel cusk

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Outline by Rachel Cusk review – vignettes from a writing workshop

I n one of many remarkable passages in Rachel Cusk's new novel, the narrator, an English writer who has flown to Athens for a few days to teach a writing workshop, gives a detailed account of her first class, in which she asks each of the 10 students to talk about something they noticed on their way in. It doesn't perhaps sound like the most riveting premise for a scene, and there must be plenty of people in the creative writing business who have resisted doing their own version of it, wary of the risks of literary shop-talk. But Cusk, who has a gift for making the most mundane situations compelling, plunges right in, emerging with a miniature tour de force of human portraiture and storytelling virtuosity.

Outward appearances are calmly noted: the grey classroom with its humming computer "projecting a blank blue rectangle on to the wall"; the faces and gestures of the students themselves, one with "a demolished beauty she bore quite regally", one "whose expression I had watched grow sourer and sourer as the hour passed", each of them a study in shyness, charm, naivety, smugness or some other sharply observed quality.

Then, as they tell their anecdotes, the scene probes inward into the emotional realities of the students' lives, while simultaneously pushing further outward into the very different worlds they each inhabit. There's a failed pianist who has heard a snatch of familiar music wafting from a window on her way to class. There's a politically committed young man unexpectedly shamed by the sight of some ruined buildings that had been set on fire in a demonstration he'd proudly taken part in the year before. There's the woman of demolished beauty, who has just discovered that her philandering husband has eliminated everything not white from his office, "including some of the people".

By turns touching, grotesque, funny, mundane, the little vignettes have the very natural-seeming inconsequentiality of life, while at the same time resonating with the wider preoccupations of the book: intimacy and estrangement, entrapment and self-regeneration, the idea of marriage as "a system of belief, a story". They are also (and this dense economy of function is a part of Cusk's skill) the chief means by which we come to know the narrator herself, whose acts of close attention to each story and its teller cumulatively suggest the "outline" (as the book's title has it) of her own story, and supply almost all we get by way of information about her own circumstances.

Almost, but not all. Halfway through the class, her phone rings. It's her young son, calling from London, where he is walking to school: "'I'm lost,' he said. 'I don't know where I am.'"

It's an amazing moment, sending a jolt of dramatic urgency through the scene, and confronting the narrator with the hazards involved in her quest for what emerges, tentatively and obliquely, as "a different way of living in the world"; outside the old structures of marriage and family.

The long scene, with its sketches and sharp surprises, its vivid portraiture and covert self-disclosure, along with the running conversation among the students about what makes a story a story, amounts to a kind of impromptu symposium on the relationship between the lives we live and the necessary fictions by which we live them; principally the fiction of love. And in essence that describes the project of Outline as a whole. There's no great plot or overarching conflict, no exotic material, no satirical contrivance; not even (and this seems new for Cusk) any overt social or political axe to grind. In parallel with her narrator's rejection of certain social conventions, Cusk seems to be rejecting the conventions of a certain kind of fiction. Her narrative consists almost entirely of encounters with people whom Faye, the writer, meets: on the plane, in the classroom and at various cafes and restaurants in Athens. There are other writers teaching at the school: a depressed Greek publisher, a popular feminist author who seems initially brought on for purposes of slightly cruel comedy but who evolves, as her monologue takes ever stranger twists and turns, into a complex and subtly sympathetic individual. Counterbalancing these literary types is an ageing, not-quite-successful Greek businessman, who takes Faye out on his boat and provides the book with its funny, painful and idiosyncratic love interest.

Everything is staked on these encounters, which is to say, on Faye's powers of observation and understanding, and her ability to invest the ordinary flux of life with meaning. In this respect, Outline belongs to a strain of literature that runs from the Romantics, through Virginia Woolf, to the memoiristic novels of contemporaries such as Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard . It's the hardest kind of fiction to bring off, always running the risk of narcissism and banality, but when it works, it feels paradoxically more miraculous than its artifice-dependent cousins. To my mind Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on to the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller.

At the end of the workshop scene, the student whose expression was growing "sourer and sourer" explodes in rage at Faye's approach to writing: "something that as far as she was aware involved using your imagination". The idea that "imagination" has to mean making stuff up, rather than seeing reality in a fresh way, is pretty primitive, and the book doesn't really need to indemnify itself against that objection. A more challenging case could be made that in funnelling all the characters' stories through Faye's very refined sensibility (there's little direct speech), Cusk gives them all a certain high-polished sameness, at least at the purely verbal level. I can't say that bothered me, but no doubt it will keep some readers from responding to the book as enthusiastically as I did. It didn't make the Man Booker longlist, for instance. But on the other hand it was serialised in its entirety by the Paris Review, a rare distinction, and a richly deserved tribute to what strikes me as a stellar accomplishment.

• Rachel Cusk

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From the Outline Trilogy series , Vol. 1

by Rachel Cusk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 13, 2015

Dark, for sure, but rich in human variety and unsentimental empathy: a welcome change from the cloistered, self-absorbed...

Following an off-key memoir ( Aftermath ,   2012), Cusk returns to fiction and top form in a novel about the stories we tell ourselves and others.

The nameless narrator is on a plane from London to Athens to teach a summer writing course when an older Greek man begins to confide in her about his unhappy childhood. After learning the narrator is divorced, he tells her about his own marital misadventures. “So much is lost…in the shipwreck,” he says mournfully. It’s the first of many keening conversation she has with her students, Greek friends and fellow writers. They reveal marriages splintered when shared assumptions diverge; parents wearied by their children’s demands but ambivalent when they cease; the struggle to give up comforting illusions and face reality—but then again, don’t we all construct our own realities? (That question, unsurprisingly, especially preoccupies her younger students.) As they pour forth the particulars of their lives, the narrator sparingly doles out some of hers while coping with texts and phone calls from her needy sons. Pained by the disconnect “between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have,” she says, “I had decided to want nothing at all….I was trying to find a different way of living in the world.” The existential musing can get somewhat abstract, but it’s grounded by Cusk’s knack for telling details: the slightly reddened eyes of the narrator’s friend who asks for a nonalcoholic beer or the vivid makeup of a woman whose unfaithful husband has just redecorated his office entirely in white. The individual stories collectively suggest that self-knowledge is a poor substitute for happiness, but perhaps readers can find some hope from the narrator’s admission that she can’t shake “this desire to be free…despite having proved that everything about it was illusory.”

Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-374-22834-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014

LITERARY FICTION

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by Rachel Cusk

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

OF MICE AND MEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

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An Appeal to Listen and Learn

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By Dwight Garner

• Jan. 6, 2015

Sometimes a book arrives in your life exactly when you need it. Such was the case for me with “Outline,” Rachel Cusk’s new novel.

Reeling from holiday food and conviviality, wishing to make the world go away, feeling in my bones W. H. Auden’s comment, “Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation,” I picked up Ms. Cusk’s thin volume, though with only modest expectations. Her previous novels have been adept but traditional in form. They can blur in the mind.

“Outline” is a sharp break with Ms. Cusk’s past fiction. It’s a deliberate shedding of skin from a writer who not long ago announced in The Guardian her newfound conviction that conventional fiction is “fake and embarrassing.” That’s an easy thing for a novelist to say, a far harder thing to persuasively follow through on in her work.

Follow through she does. “Outline” is a poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way of straightforward plot yet is transfixing in its unruffled awareness of the ways we love and leave each other, and of what it means to listen to other people. The most resonant verb in her novel is “ask.”

“Outline” is about a female narrator, a divorced writer who lives in London with her two youngish children. The book’s events take place over the several days she spends in Athens, where she has gone to teach a writing class.

It’s summertime and oppressively hot. She has meals with friends, most of them in the book world: editors, writers, poets. She drinks wine and listens to their stories, most of them about heartache. She spends time on a boat with a much older Greek bachelor whom she met on her flight in.

While little happens in “Outline,” everything seems to happen. You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit.

This is largely because the small conversations and monologues in “Outline” are, at their best, as condensed and vivid as theater. Sometimes the chapters in “Outline” brought Harold Pinter or Wallace Shawn or Annie Baker to mind, at other times J. M. Coetzee or Diane Johnson.

The narrator is mostly a listener, an asker of questions, an intellectual filter. Posing meaningful questions to others, or even unmeaningful ones, she correctly observes, is a skill that “many people never learn.”

You sense she has found the right people to listen to. About worthwhile people, she quotes one of her friends: “The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.”

The narrator in “Outline” is on the run from one kind of life and searching for where next to pitch her emotional, mental, moral tent. Sometimes that place sounds impossible to locate or, almost the same thing, locatable anywhere. “There was a difference,” she says, “between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.” You like this woman, in part, because you are not sure if you like her at all.

A modest amount of literary talk occurs in “Outline,” though even that tends to swing back around to romantic failure. (Ms. Cusk’s most recent book was an embittered 2012 memoir titled “Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation.” ) One of the narrator’s writer friends compares a book of fiction to marriage, in this sense: “You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that’s never repeated. It’s the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.”

Ms. Cusk’s novel moves away from the table, from the wine and the book talk, when her narrator goes on boat trips with the older Greek man. It’s clear that he’s attracted to her, but we’re not sure what she sees in him. He is short, fat and draped in gold jewelry. He waddles as much as walks. She reads literary fiction; he reads Wilbur Smith novels.

“It struck me that some people might think I was stupid, to go out alone on a boat with a man I didn’t know,” the narrator says. “But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitely left those structures.”

You come to realize that he listens to her more than most of the others do. Yet scenes in his boat have a looming sense of dread. He attempts to kiss her, and that’s a horror show. She feels as though a “prehistoric creature were wrapping me in its dry batlike wings.”

Ms. Cusk marshals a lot of gifts in this novel, and they are unconventional ones. With no straightforward narrative to hang onto, no moving in and out of rooms, she’s left with the sound of her own mind, and it’s a mind that is subtle, precise, melancholy. This is a novel with no wasted motion.

One of this book’s unconventional realizations is that even your closest friends can harm you. “It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction,” Ms. Cusk writes.

In its micro-moments “Outline” poses a lot of big questions. Who are we when we no longer recognize the people who are closest to us? What does success mean, in any arena in life? One bleak definition this book provides: “It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.”

“Outline” is a palate cleanser, an authoritative bit of clarifying acid, here when needed.

By Rachel Cusk

249 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26.

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Review: Outline by Rachel Cusk

It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions, one that I had only become aware of once it was no longer there … 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.

Following a divorce, Faye turns inward and becomes absent from her exterior life – it hurts less than being present. An English writer, her narrative picks up as she embarks on a journey to Greece, where she will teach a short writing course. Along the way, she encounters many others with stories to tell – stories which are remarkably like her own. Through their words, the outline of Faye’s self becomes more distinct, even as she recedes from the story.

Outline (2014) is a remarkable example of autofiction in which Rachel Cusk creates a story where both she and her narrator are seemingly absent while at the same time constantly present. Cusk has experienced the consequences of writing straight, unflinching autobiography in the past [ 1 ] – autofiction feels like a smart response, an opportunity to defy and deflect at once. Faye’s passivity may be a reflection of society’s desire that women go about their lives quietly without upsetting the apple cart, but neither Faye nor Cusk are truly taking a backseat here.

If the conversations relayed are not as ‘natural’ as they may first appear, what does the reader take from the recurring themes each centres on – the failed bids for freedom, illusions being shattered, and the desire for a sense of belonging that no longer exists? Undoubtedly, here is a psychic picture of a person going through a watershed trauma, a divorce from a person and a past that has left them shattered by the experience.

Faye’s most frequent conversational partner is a man she meets on her flight to Athens. She refers to him throughout as ‘my neighbour’ alluding back to their adjacent seats on the plane journey. Her neighbour is an older Greek man (although he has spent much time in England) who has been married and divorced three times. Yet, unlike Faye he is not broken by the experience of separation, not irreparably disenchanted by life. Faye’s response to divorce is to recede from the life of hope:

There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

His is blindly optimistic:

He has been disillusioned more times than he could count in his relationships with women. Yet part of that feeling—the feeling of excitement that is also a rebirth of identity—has attended all his experiences of falling in love; and in the end, despite everything that has happened, these have been the most compelling moments of his life.

His hope that love, recaptured or fresh, can return him to a blissful state of contentment is Gatsby-esque in its persistence but it is clear that he has not learned from his past failures and thus is doomed to repeat them. 

While in Athens, her neighbour takes Faye out on his boat a number of times. On one of these trips, Faye sees a young family on a boat nearby:

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.

For Faye, the family – and what they represent – is outside of her existence. She cannot interact with them just as she cannot return to their state of complete, oblivious investment in life. Instead, she is sidelined, an observer.

While on first view her neighbour appears stronger and more resilient than Faye, it becomes clear that blind optimism - a failure to face the truth of things - makes him the weaker person, and one who will increase the sum of suffering in the world as he chases unreachable fantasies of contentment. When Faye rejects his groaningly ham-fisted advances late in the novel, she asserts that she is different from him: she will not go on, trapped in a cycle of repetition.

Faye is at a moment in her life when she is breaking from her past and determining that she must live for herself, whatever that means. Yet, at the same time she undermines the idea of identity and indicates that she does not buy into the idea of an Authentic self:

I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.

At the same time Faye, ironically given the way her story is told, suggests that identity cannot be formed through the lens of other people, that many of the crutches she had used in the past no longer seem viable: 

As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

However, Faye feels exposed as a woman moving into middle-age, who cannot fall back on the identity of mother and wife in the way that many of her peers can. As one of the other characters at the end of Outline emphasises, a divorced woman is subject to the gaze of many people, who suddenly see her afresh.  

For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives. But for her, coming back out into the world again, the lines were still sharp, the expectations undimmed: sometimes she felt as if she’d arrived at a party just as everyone else was leaving, leaving to go home together and sleep.

Outline ’s themes are not only reflected in the characters that populate the novel, but the places too. That Faye’s trip is to Greece is significant. Greece, with its great history but which is now “on its knees and dying a slow and agonizing death.” Like Faye – and many of the other characters – Greece as a country is shown to have taken its good days for granted and complacently drifted towards the jolt that has awoken it. 

Greece is not only relevant for its place in the modern world, but for its rich cultural history. Like Homer ’s ' Odyssey ', Faye’s odyssey makes the idea of homecoming central, but in Outline there is no hope of return for Faye. Thus, Outline is very sharply severed from the literary tradition.

It is not simply the traditions of classical literature that Outline separates itself from, but the idea of the novel – a far more recent invention – too. For there is no plot in Outline , no story arc, and no conflict between characters. It would be easy to label Outline a work of negation, but instead I prefer to call it an experiential piece. Stories do not need to have a beginning, middle, and end to qualify as stories, despite what the neatly packaged tales Faye relays may have you believe. In fact, Faye’s way of narrativising the stories of other characters is an amusing paradox to how her own story is relayed. Cusk is teasing the reader, asking if they will suspend their credulity as one character after another, purportedly, relays a story that encapsulates the essence of their self. It is a knowing wink to the writers and readers of fiction.  

For the most part, Cusk’s style is tight, her prose economical. But occasionally there is a joke that may be superfluous but really hits the spot. Having been asked to write a short story that includes an animal, one of the class that Faye teaches reports the following:

He had got up early to write his story, he said, though he had found it hard to introduce an animal into his chosen subject-matter, which was the hypocrisy of our religious leaders and the failure of public commentators to subject them to the proper scrutiny.

This will tickle anyone who has studied Creative Writing. And that is maybe a statement that applies to Outline more generally. It is a book that requires the reader to work and which will, I suspect, prove more fruitful for those not interested only in the consumption of fiction but the creation of it too. By the novel’s end, Faye remains an “outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.” For the reader who does not wish to do the filling in, I suggest they give Outline a wide berth; for everyone else, this is a book worth grappling with.

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That first quote is so memorable

Loved the quote about the 'real' self. Great elaborate review.

I always welcome comments...

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BookBrowse Reviews Outline by Rachel Cusk

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by Rachel Cusk

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• Dealing with Loss
• Strong Women
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By listening to the stories of others, the protagonist in Outline discovers the nuances of human nature.

One of the first things that strikes the reader of this, Rachel Cusk's eighth novel, is the unusual taciturnity of its narrator. An almost wordless storyteller is, on the face of it, a contradiction in terms, if not a complete impossibility. After all, how can a tale be told in virtual silence? It is, however, precisely this dichotomy that Cusk exploits to remarkable effect in Outline . Rather than creating a conventional story-teller, she turns the concept of narration on its head, presenting us instead with a blank canvas, a woman of few words who, in exuding a quiet calm, attracts a host of diverse characters who are seduced by her innate stillness. Compelled to fill the silence that surrounds her, the people she encounters over the course of the book recount the story of their own lives. One of the most poignant is that of a Greek businessman who, despite his wealth, has failed to find fulfilment with a string of wives, and who now spends his declining years forever regretting the failure of his marriage to his first — and truest — love. Through this and other individual portraits of love and loss, of happiness and sadness, of disappointment and regret, we are presented with a profound meditation on life and what it means to be human. About the narrator herself, we are given scant information. That she remains nameless for most of the novel only adds to her mystique and the essential unknowability of her character. In fact, when we are suddenly, and quite jarringly, presented with her name in the penultimate chapter, it feels like an invasion of a sacred space, as if the reader is trespassing on private property. The particulars can be summed up in a few words - the narrator is a writer who has travelled to Greece to teach a short creative writing course, briefly leaving behind in England, two sons and the wreckage of a failed marriage. Indeed, much of the void within and around her has been created by the disintegration of this marriage; it has opened a great empty chasm which she tries to fill by gaining an understanding, through the people who talk to her, of the 'hows' and 'whys' of human nature. In this way, she gains from the confessions of others just as they benefit from the unburdening act of confessing. "...While he talked," we are told towards the end of the book, "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 remains unknown, gave her…a sense of who she was." Whatever discoveries the narrator makes about her sense of self are never disclosed; she remains a mystery, a faded-to-gray outline. This expertly conveyed incompleteness can at times be unsatisfying, especially for readers who prefer a conventionally structured story with a defined beginning, middle and end. Ultimately however, this unfinished quality is a perfect metaphor for life in all its messy, constantly evolving glory. Outline bears all the hallmarks of Rachel Cusk at her best. The finely crafted prose reveals a virtuosity in her command of language which is rendered with an admirable lightness of touch. The nature of life, love, and loss are recurring themes throughout her work and in Outline they are as insightfully explored as ever. This is a fiercely intelligent, emotionally intuitive novel. While at times its sheer profundity can be overwhelming, if not a little intimidating, this book has something to offer anyone who has discovered, like the narrator and her interlocutors, that "there is no such thing as life without pain."

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Beyond the Book:    Made in Greece

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Book Review: Outline by Rachel Cusk

Once in the Athenian heat, we flit into the lives of the various writers on the retreat. At times, the novel’s interweaving narratives — the tales within tales, the tales told and those remembered, and even those actually happening — blend with a cloudy haziness. At times, it’s difficult to distinguish between the stories and their speakers, even as Cusk attempts to assert an independent voice through the glaze that is the reporting of the narrative voice. She seems to invade her own narrator when examining the consciousness of her characters:

So crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams, knowledge and the plethora of her day-to-day responsibilities, but also of other people’s – gleaned over years of listening, talking, empathising, worrying – that she was frightened most of all of the boundaries separating [the] distinctions between them…

The intriguing emotional bonds between writer and characters in this enthralling portrait of femininity are reflected in this sense of self-awareness. Importantly, Faye’s very name only comes to our attention in an accident of narrative — we realise in such moments of casual revelation how Faye constantly looks outward, rarely interrogating herself and instead relishing her indiscernibility from those around her. Despite the many stories told, we end up learning relatively little directly about our protagonist. Instead she remains a vessel, an outline from which we are able to draw our own conclusions — her own reporting and reactions vital signals that allow us to assemble her character.

The idea that events need to be explored and unwound in the presence of others, particularly strangers, seems to reflect Cusk’s own process of writing. Writing workshops delicately unravel and interrogate and the process of writing is constantly re-examined through different perspectives — the manner in which we create stories interrogated with curious intent. The book, like a class, pronounces clearly and didactically both the danger joy in authorship. Cusk dares to consider “the role of the artist might merely be that of recording sequences, such as a computer could one day be programmed to you”. She examines and questions acutely the purpose and point of creation and writing: in what manner they contribute to society, and how artificial that process is.

Is the perfect story a simple sequence? A code that can be programmed into a machine to produce creativity? By the end this system of interweaving, of outlining and of empty shells comes to the fore. What are we if not the perceptions we collect? What do our empty outlines consist of if not the stories we fix resolutely to ourselves? In this book, there is ultimately a deliberated consideration of the outlines we draw for ourselves, those we draw for other people, and those drawn for us.

The novel’s original serialisation in The Paris Review is a testament to the beauty of Cusk’s prose — she creates characters in the simplest and most revealing terms: blunt, precise and incredibly attentive to detail. The idea of serialisation pervades the book, its form at times suggesting a mass of short stories pulled together by a variety of narrative strings rather than one secure moulded whole. It feels more like a jigsaw, a collection of loose and individual moments that find a rigid ritual of cohesion in their dependence upon one another. Despite the evident wholeness of the novel, there remains a singular joy in these apparent divisions. The fragments that Cusk leaves us with are crafted uniquely and appealingly, each whole and almost – only almost— able to stand completely alone and apart from each other.

Before the book’s initial exploration of Faye’s plane journey it presents us with her short lived meeting with a billionaire keen to give her the “outline of his life story” and it is this sense of ‘outline’ that Cusk perfects, creating the pitch perfect observational descriptions of her characters through vivid and calculated details. Cusk manages deftly to extract tales through these outlines to conversely yield a book of true substance, even if its own formal outline (from serialised fragments to autonomous whole) is itself shown to be one that can easily be redrawn.

About Thea Hawlin

Theodora (Thea) Hawlin is assistant editor and production manager of The London Magazine.

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Invaded, destroyed, rebuilt: Outline by Rachel Cusk

• Outline by Rachel Cusk Faber 256pp $29.99 AU Published September, 2014 ISBN 978057123362

In one of Outline ’s many stories within stories, a recently divorced father recounts a perilous drive into the hills beyond Athens. It was, Paniotis tells the novel’s narrator, the first time he had taken his children on his own. As a storm descended, the steep mountain roads turned to mud. Herds of pigs and goats surged across their path and the children, pocked with mosquito bites from their stay in a filthy motel – bites Paniotis feared would become infected – screamed as floodwater poured into the car. Later, still panicked by their predicament, Paniotis phoned his ex-wife from a mountain inn. Her silence, her failure to ‘take up, as it were, her part in our lifelong duet’, pitched him deeper into distress.

This post-divorce saga is one of several in Rachel Cusk’s new novel. It is one of the more dynamic episodes. Yet Outline is most concerned with the storyteller’s inner drama. One of Cusk’s key themes is the workings of the self when it is forced back on its own resources in the wake of separation, loss and solitude. It is no accident that Paniotis, with his mounting calamities and jittery persona, seems to have catapulted out of a Thomas Bernhard novel. Cusk’s work evokes the Austrian writer’s in several ways.

Cusk’s seven previous novels are each works of restrained and elegant lyrical realism. Several, such as Arlington Park (2006) and the most recent The Bradshaw Variations (2009), explore the dissatisfactions and conflicts in the lives of middle-class artists, parents and married couples in urban and rural settings. In Arlington Park , Cusk drew on the single-day design of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) to follow the lives of five discontented suburban women. The Bradshaw Variations  describes the dynamics between a couple and their extended family. Thomas Bradshaw becomes a stay-at-home father, and takes up piano lessons when his wife takes a senior academic job; both struggle with art and ambition, with intimacy and waning desire.

The style of these works gives little sign of the shift to come in Outline , though all of Cusk’s novels share an interest in the conflicted inner lives of their characters, which often contrast with their comfortable surroundings. ‘She writes to rebut the idea that domestic life, as subject matter, is trivial and whimsical,’ observed Hilary Mantel in a sharp review of The Bradshaw Variations .

There is perhaps a precursor to Outline ’s preoccupations in that novel: when Thomas Bradshaw reads aloud to his young daughter, he finds in her books

explanations for everything for love and survival, struggle and pleasure, happiness and grief, for belief, for the shape and arc of life itself. The only thing that is never explained is reality.

Reality is one of Outline ’s key themes and it extends beyond the content and the characters’ concerns, calling into question the very idea of the novel. This existential inquiry is embedded in Outline ’s autofictional approach.

Those who have read Cusk’s controversial memoirs, may feel they know quite a bit about her personal travails, and this will likely inflect their reading of Outline , with its protagonist who resembles the author. Both A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) and Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012) met with considerable controversy in the British press. Cusk’s memoir of motherhood was welcomed by many for its frank depiction of the often sentimentalised subjects of pregnancy, birth and mothering. But it was damned by several reviewers for its unsparing depiction of the depravations, competitiveness and sublimation that can also characterise this phase of women’s lives.

Of Cusk’s fictional characters, Mantel writes: ‘Cusk is curt and merciless.’ And I suspect it is this same talent for skewering that offends when it is deployed in her memoirs. The surprising intensity of the first memoir’s reception has been the subject of several literary forums. Some, such as Katie Roiphe’s recent article for Slate , noted the comparatively benign response to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s unflinching account of fatherhood in his My Struggle series. Cusk’s response to the reaction, published in the Guardian , summarised the reviewers’ most caustic moments:

I was accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual. One curious article questioned the length of my sentences: how had I, a mother, been able to write such long and complicated sentences? Why was I not busier, more tired? Another reviewer – a writer! – commanded her readers not to let the book fall into the hands of pregnant women.

Having become ‘the mother mums love to hate’ after vitriolic posts about A Life’s Work appeared on Mumsnet , an online parenting blog, Cusk was again chastised for exposing her family when she published her second memoir. Some of the criticism rightly questioned Aftermath ’s uneasy blending of Greek mythology with a personal account of separation, loss and divorce. But this hardly justified the double-exposure Cusk was subjected to when further personal details were revealed and raked over in the press.

These controversies are now widely known and Cusk will often raise them in interviews, yet I hesitated to include them here. While this context partly explains the author’s shift away from conventional realism and memoir in favour of Outline ’s essayistic mode of fictionalised autobiography – a move she directly attributes to Aftermath ’s reception – none of the background clamor accounts for Outline ’s mesmerising qualities. It is, for me, Cusk’s finest work to date. Its rhythmic, associative, looping episodes contain a series of portraits of the mind at work understanding itself.

Outline ’s narrator is Faye, a recently divorced British writer and mother, who travels to Athens to teach a summer creative writing class. During her stay, she meets several people, some loosely connected, from many parts of the literary world. The gaunt Paniotis, with his wild hair and ‘eyebrows winging off like exclamation marks’, publishes English-language translations, but his business – impacted by the Greek recession – is failing. He is trying to make sense of a life that once seemed governed by the ‘story of improvement’ – a story that ‘commandeered our deepest sense of reality’ – but has taken a less idealistic turn. Angeliki is a tawny-haired literary celebrity, whose novel A Lonely Place has made her, as Paniotis sneers, ‘a spokesperson for suffering women’. ‘My neighbour’, as Faye refers to him throughout, is a heavy-set Greek man she meets on her flight to Athens. His family saga – which involves shipping fortunes, broken marriages and a mentally ill son roaming a Greek island while under a form of house arrest – rivals the Greek tragedies for its tales of feuds and personal ruin.

Each character’s story is partly paraphrased by Faye, but even when they are directly quoted we feel the writer-protagonist continually at work, framing and shaping the narrative. We could call Faye an unreliable narrator – and the novel suggests there is no other kind: everything we receive, it says, is mediated, everything is subjective – and, by extension, all narrators are unreliable. This may sound like something from Postmodernism 101, but at no time during Outline did I feel like I was being lectured. It can often seem unjust, when considering a novel of ideas, to pluck some out for scrutiny. Pinned to the page they will seem too bright and obvious, their liveliness rapidly ebbs. Within Cusk’s novel, however, the ideas float up obliquely within long, flowing paragraphs, and this effortlessness is one of its finest qualities.

Outline ’s milieu of middle-class, educated artists and thinkers (variations on characters in Cusk’s previous novels) may seem hermetic. The novel is, for example, less wide-ranging in scope, less airy and amply detailed than those of Knausgaard, whom Cusk admires. If Knausgaard’s My Struggle series presents the entire set of family albums, then Outline gives us a few double-exposed portraits from mid-life. Cusk’s fiction has always been stylised, taut, and at times too neatly composed. But Outline ’s design arises organically from its content and has a resulting rightness. Its themes are so seamlessly incorporated that they are sensed rather than signaled right throughout the final architecture.

Faye and her storytellers so precisely narrate their predicaments that we immediately grasp the novel’s central concern: it is not the stories we tell but how we tell them that truly reveals who we are. Outline is preoccupied with the relationship between narrative and identity, and has a fascination with point of view. In this way, it is more akin to what Michael Hoffman, writing on Bernhard, calls ‘sculptures of opinion’ than ‘contraptions assembled from character interactions’. This is a very talky novel. It is philosophical and remarkably dynamic, considering that it consists largely of people speaking to each other – in restaurants and apartments, on boats and planes.

Faye’s fellow writing teacher, an Irishman named Ryan, is literally fractured, appearing to consist of ‘unrelated elements so that the different parts of him didn’t entirely go together’. Having learned a little of the local lingo during his stay, he tells Faye that in Greek the word ellipsis means, ‘to hide behind silence’. The first detail comments on the novel’s interest in fragmentation; the second on the narrator’s elusive presence in the novel. These ideas unspool without undue emphasis, making Outline less overtly cerebral in tone than, for example, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014). Both Cusk and Lerner use fictionalised autobiography to shape digressive narratives which feel seductively allied to reality; both feature self-reflexive narrators who closely resemble their authors. But they do this with markedly different effects.

During one of their several encounters, Faye’s ‘neighbour’ describes one of his three marriages. The relationship had culminated in physical violence. The ‘story of who had done what to whom’ was unfolded in court, in order to establish guilt and determine punishment, in a process that promised a ‘resolution that never came’. This dispute, says Faye’s neighbour,

could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more … Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

This neatly encapsulates another of Outline ’s themes: the impossibility of encompassing reality in one single story, and the damage that limited accounts can wreak on intimacy and love.

In her role as intermediary, Faye seems at first an outline. We are told very little about her. But slowly we gather the facts. Now a single mother of two boys, she has recently moved from the home which, since her divorce, had ‘become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion’. As she shapes what we learn of the other characters, she gains in contrast and volume, light and shade. By filling us in, she also fills out herself. Her internal life is revealed in how she responds to others’ experiences. Her still, attentive presence suggests that she has repressed any former exuberance – yet this inner material still smoulders.

At one point, Faye evokes a scene from Wuthering Heights in which Heathcliff and Cathy look from the darkened garden into the Lintons’ drawing room. Faye writes,

What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things … But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise 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.

This is, of course, an allegory of her own isolation. Faye is glassed off from those around her. She cannot decide how to be: ‘in the moment and living outside it – which was more real?’ It is partly the prospect of her breaking through that keeps us reading. Yet Outline is uninterested in any kind of redemptive narrative ‘progress’. Faye’s discomfort with the (‘fatal’) subjectivity that separates us from others evokes the postmodern turn in psychology, where notions of a stable, objectively ‘real’ self were relinquished in favour of a concept of fractured identity. This model, influenced by Eastern philosophies, including Buddhism, also acknowledged how inseparable identity is from the language we use to describe it – think of Lacan’s dictum ‘I am not a poet but a poem’. In this light, another way to read Cusk’s novel of many selves is to consider each storyteller as a split-off aspect of Faye herself. Read in this way, the novel becomes a kind of collective biography, which in the words of David Shields ‘when read as a whole and tilted at just the right angle’ can ‘refract brilliant, harsh light back upon the author’.

Faye evokes the figure of the analyst in the way she likes to listen; the novel’s introspection and free-associating attention circles from the conversation at hand to literary allusion, sensory or concrete detail, and on to philosophical reflection. But Faye is no neutral observer. She can be flinty and disapproving, or gently observant. After her ‘neighbour’ dissects one of his divorces, Faye observes:

I remained dissatisfied by the story of his second marriage. It had lacked objectivity; it relied too heavily on extremes, and the moral properties it ascribed to those extremes were often incorrect.

Here is an authorial figure, talking about narration in lawyerly terms; but here too is Faye, bristling at the storyteller’s lack of objectivity, a concept she appears to have once put her faith in. Can we really ‘objectively’ narrate the decline of a marriage? We sense that Faye (and Cusk) has asked this of herself. Her inquiring is part of the novel’s momentum and makes Outline into a kind of bildungsroman . As the storytellers recount their fractured contemporary lives, and their resulting disenchantment, and as Faye grapples with the relationship between narrative, truth and identity, we witness her education in a postmodern reality.

After her divorce, Faye must jettison the security she once gained from that state of collective delusion: marriage. There is a moment early in the novel, on the plane to Athens, when we see how lulling a shared belief can sometimes be, how it can shield us from the chaos of too much reality:

We were strapped in our seats, a field of strangers, in a silence like the silence of a congregation while the liturgy is read. [The hostess] led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time.

Note the language of the devout, the shared delusion. The passengers mutely accept the aircraft’s flimsy safety devices, while repressing the possibility of their use. After the spiel on oxygen masks, Faye says, ‘no one protested or spoke to disagree with this commandment that one should take care of others only after taking care of oneself. Yet I wasn’t sure it was entirely true’. This passage foregrounds the novel’s preoccupations: the field of strangers, Faye’s silence, the nostalgia for belief systems that promise safety, survival, selflessness.

Outline ’s setting among the ruins of Athens – the ancient stones, colonnades and monuments of the Agora – reminds us that these personal dramas, envies and torments are eternal. While the mode of storytelling may have changed over time, the elements are familiar. Cusk evenly doles out her lightness and shadow, her passages on loss and beauty. Even Paniotis’s disastrous family journey gets its transcendent moment. After the rain, the mud, the mosquitoes and flood, after the call to the ex-wife (which is, inevitably, answered by her new man), Paniotis and his children are struck suddenly by sunlight. As they walk through the Lousios Gorge, they come upon a pool beneath a waterfall. All three leap in, naked. ‘How cold the water was,’ Paniotis tells Faye, ‘and how incredibly deep and refreshing and clear – we drifted around and around, with the sun on our faces and our bodies hanging like three white roots beneath the water.’

It is this experience of being uprooted that interests Cusk, and the possibility of renewal. The family’s immersion becomes a secular ritual, a purification after crisis. How do we galvanise our inner resources, however scant, or underused? What are our secular resources for emotional survival? The existence of the novel itself is one kind of answer, for Cusk has said that Aftermath ’s critical reception reduced her to a two-year silence (slower writers would not consider this a particularly catastrophic pause). Since Aftermath , Cusk told the Guardian , memoir as a form of autobiography ‘had come to an end … I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry’.

How better to recover from that double-exposure, from attacks on your subjective narrating, than with a novel about the inevitable distortions that occur in every life story? Having exposed, and in turn been exposed herself, Cusk has turned to a form that keeps her partly hidden; in creating Faye, she has invented what Shields calls ‘a surrogate self’. With a narrator who closely resembles the author, with its long paragraphs and seamless shifts from direct to reported speech, from reflection to exposition, Outline recalls Bernhard’s ‘imaginary autobiographies’. In his novels The Loser (1983) and Wittgenstein’s Nephew (1982) famous figures are invoked, as Mark Anderson writes, as ‘a foil for Bernhard himself’. Bernhard’s writing is characterised by the use of what James Wood calls ‘repetitive attribution’, where we are constantly reminded that the narrator is relaying a story told to him by another character, a style superbly adopted by W. G. Sebald and echoed in Cusk’s narrative technique. This rhythmic, circumlocutory approach creates a manic energy in Bernhard’s work, a haunting tone in Sebald’s, and in Cusk’s a mood of meditative languor.

Cusk may be indebted to Bernhard, and to Sebald – Outline ’s design brings to mind Sebald’s The Emigrants (1992), in which the narrator encounters four people displaced by world events – but her tone is entirely different. It is less wry and intractably tragic than Bernhard’s, and though it shares Sebald’s dreamy timelessness and his elegantly formal register, Outline is never entirely melancholy. Outline ’s focus on reality, its lack of interest in the machinations of plot, scene setting and character manipulation – what Wood calls ‘realistic wadding’ – feels decidedly contemporary. Though its technique has numerous literary predecessors – Proust, Phillip Roth, Elizabeth Hardwick, Renata Adler, J. M. Coetzee – it has acquired a new status partly due to the rise of Knausgaard and Lerner and the publication of Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). Another fictional autobiography with a writer / teacher narrator – Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014) – has just been shortlisted, with Outline and Lerner’s 10:04 , for the 2015 Folio Prize.

In an interview with the Guardian , Cusk attributed Outline ’s form and content to the psychological rupture that followed her divorce. After separation, without the collusive security of married life,

You are chucked out of the house, on the street, not defended any more … you have no history, no network. What you have is people, strangers in the street, and the only way you can know them is by what they say. I became attuned to these encounters because I had no frame or context any more. I could hear a purity of narrative in the way people described their lives. The intense experience of hearing this became the framework of the novel.

Divorce rendered her former self irretrievable and as her faith in conventional marriage shattered, so did her belief in the traditions of the novel. ‘Once you have suffered sufficiently,’ she told the Guardian , ‘the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous’. She abandoned what she calls ‘fake and embarrassing’ invented scenes and characters to narrate the self through the stories of others. She shares Knausgaard’s ‘nausea’ at ‘the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot’. Yet if we are to believe Outline contains no fabrication, we must wonder how much a novel so full of other people’s stories borrows from other’s lives. Whom does Cusk expose in the process of shielding herself? She presumably knows the risks – her travel book, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009), was pulped after someone she wrote about launched a breach of privacy suit.

In Reality Hunger , Shields called for works ‘where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page’. Deploying the memoirist’s frank intimacy, without the constraints of fidelity to fact, the essayistic novel opens up fresh possibilities for structure, voice and material. The first person narration and ‘wadding’-free milieu; the twin conceits – of secret sharing and lack of artifice – can gild any subject with reality’s reverent sheen.

Yet, as many critics have noted, such works are no freer of artifice than the conventional novels that Knausgaard, Cusk and others have derided as false and ridiculous. The differences are of degree; it is a question of where the writers’ energies are focused and distilled. As with any form, autofiction has its limitations. One lies with the limited quantity and scope of ‘real’ material each novelist will have to draw upon. Another, as Adelle Waldman noted in the New Yorker , is that literature built solely from writers’ lives, from writers self-reflecting, ‘would exclude the kind of people who are not, by temperament or circumstance, likely to sit down and write books’.

One way to avoid this is to give sufficient weight to the stories of others, which can provide contrasts, textures and counterpoints to a narrator’s solipsism. This is what makes Sebald’s work so masterful. In Austerlitz (2001), for example, the narrator is a fleeting presence over which Austerlitz’s story is superimposed. The narrator’s story is sublimated to the epic history of Austerlitz, an approach that both reproduces and highlights the way Holocaust histories can overshadow the stories of the next generation. In Outline , the sharing of stories evokes the confessional mode of contemporary life, where ‘sharing’ and ‘liking’ have become part of a crowd-curated identity. As Christy Wampole pointed out in the New York Times , the essay form is where ‘banal, everyday phenomena’ meld with ‘the Big Questions’:

[The essay] blends inquiry and confession into a hybrid weave that deepens each. It draws personal material into public mattering.

In Outline , neither the existential nor the everyday are given greater status. Outside of marriage and relationships, the act of sharing stories becomes a form of community building; it can be generous – though Faye’s reticence and her elusive presence in the text remind us of its shadow side, of how easily it can become intrusive.

A fully invented John and Jane might not feature in Outline , but people still ‘do things’. Plot devices contribute to the novel’s profluence; it is just that they are not heavily signposted or given undue emphasis. Who is Faye? That is the novel’s first mystery – and her name is withheld until 211 pages in. What will happen when her ‘neighbour’ – whose designs on Faye are clear, but apparently not to her – invites her onto his boat? How does her perspective shift and change as she absorbs the experiences of those she meets? In this story about stories, however coolly self-reflexive, novelistic conventions are unavoidable. During that fateful boat trip, Faye, lulled by the sea and the summer heat falls into momentary reverie. As she swims, she watches a family on a nearby craft soothing a child:

[They] held their positions, waiting, I could see, for the baby to stop crying, for the moment to release them and for the world to move forward again … The baby stopped crying and the family immediately began to stir, changing their positions in the confined space as though they were little clockwork figures rotating on a jewelry box; the father bending and putting the child in its pram, the mother rising and turning, the two boys and the girl straightening their legs and joining their hands so that they made a pinwheel shape, their bodies glittering and flashing in the sun.

To Faye, the nuclear family is a series of repetitive, mechanised gestures. It is decorative and quaint. The gestures are as outdated as the conventions of the traditional novel: conflict, action, resolution. Yet this scene produces in Faye the opposite effect: she has ‘the sense of everything in life having become atomised, all its elements separated as though an explosion had sent them flying away from the centre in different directions’. She wonders where her own children are and remembers being a child watching the landscape from the back of the family car, a landscape ‘so full and ripe at that time of year that it seemed impossible it could ever be broken down and turned to winter’. We are made starkly aware of Faye’s solitude, her intermittent loneliness, and what she has left behind.

Pristine points of stillness punctuate the novel’s cascading stories, reminding us that being in the moment is one possible cure for despair, for the mind’s relentless projecting into the future. This is reinforced when Paniotis, neatly capturing one aspect of postmodern life, tells Faye that the ‘story of improvement’ is a lie:

it has even infected the novel, though perhaps now the novel is infecting us back again, so that we expect of our lives what we’ve come to expect of our books; but this sense of life as a progression is something I want no more of.

This is not a particularly new or remarkable observation. But attributed to the melancholy figure of the failed publisher, this meditation on progress and self-improvement becomes poignant. Paniotis, we learn, aimed to publish English translations of writers he deeply admired, writers that ‘commercial publishers wouldn’t touch’, and yet his hope to secure a new audience for these marginal figures was dashed when the Greek recession left him unable to pay the authors.

In the novel’s closing pages, we meet Anne, who has arrived unexpectedly early to stay in the apartment Faye has been renting. Anne, ‘an attenuated, whey-faced, corkscrew-haired person’ eating honey straight from a jar, soon tells Faye about her life. She too is divorced. She has issues with food, which are bound up with post-traumatic stress. After she was almost strangled by an attacker, her first instinct – like the distraught Paniotis – had been to phone her ex, but after his curt and distant response to her distress she realised how different they had become, that her former husband ‘did not share her view’. She turned to more sympathetic strangers –policemen and counselors – to deal with the incident. But, she tells Faye, she is trying not to talk about it anymore.

How she should spend a day in Athens? Faye suggests the Agora with its ‘headless statues of goddesses in the colonnade’, which seems a pretty overt symbol for what Anne has just described, but as Faye continues, the story turns briefly but tellingly toward herself. ‘It was cool there and peaceful and the massive marble bodies in the soft looking draperies, so anonymous and mute, were strangely consoling.’ The Agora becomes a symbol of more than the silence and violence endured by women throughout time. As a place ‘invaded, destroyed and rebuilt many times’ before its final rescue and preservation, it represents the dignity of what is broken, and remade and is perhaps more arresting for all its imperfections. It stands, in the end, for Faye herself.

Rachel Cusk, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (Faber, 2012). ⎯ I Was Only Being Honest, Guardian , (21 March 2008). Michael Hoffman, ‘Reger Said,’ London Review of Books (4 November 2010). Kate Kellaway, ‘Rachel Cusk: “Aftermath was creative death. I was heading into total silence.”’ Guardian (24 August 2014). Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Man in Love: My Struggle, Book 2 , translated by Don Bartlett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Ben Lerner, 10:04 (Faber, 2014). Hilary Mantel, ‘The Bradshaw Variations,’ Guardian (29 August, 2009). Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (Granta, 2014). Miranda Purves, ‘Rachel Cusk on her new novel, The Bradshaw Variations ,’ Elle (14 April 2010) . Katie Roiphe, ‘Her Struggle,’ Slate (7 July 2014). David Shields, ‘Autobiography as Criticism, Criticism as Autobiography,’ The Iowa Review , 39: 1 (2009). ⎯  Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Vintage, 2011). Adelle Waldman, ‘An Answer to the Novel’s Detractors,’ New Yorker (2 December 2014). Christy Wampole, ‘The Essayification of Everything,’ New York Times (26 May 2013).

Mireille Juchau is a novelist, essayist and critic. Her third novel, The World Without Us, was...

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• Paradise Estate by Max Easton Giramondo Publishing October 2023 288pp ISBN 9781922725844

The Slow Decline of the (Inner) West 

What happens to a cultural scene when making rent overtakes the urgency of making art? As Joseph Earp argues, this is the question posed by Max Easton’s Paradise Estate, a new novel charting the declining fortunes of the sharehouse coteries in inner-west Sydney.

‘Outline: A novel’ by Rachel Cusk

‘Outline,” the remarkably original novel by Rachel Cusk, tells the story of a writer, numbed by heartbreak, who rediscovers the meaning of art and love through her conversations with others. The book also offers a bracing indictment of the sentimentality that surrounds the making of art and artistic identity. The novel suggests that far from being benign, this development represents the opposite of art and love. Cusk, whose previous novels have been well-received and traditional, breaks new and refreshing ground with “Outline.’’

Faye, the book’s narrator, is a British novelist teaching a week-long summer writing workshop in Athens. Recently divorced and a single mother, she has taken the job out of financial necessity. Told in a series of conversations with people Faye encounters during the week — a Greek bachelor she meets on the airplane and with whom she develops an awkward friendship; an Irish writer; her students; Greek writers who form a circle of acquaintances; and a playwright recovering from a violent mugging — the novel lacks a traditional plot. But the ideas it evokes, such as the meaning of art and life and how one can lead a meaningful living making art, make it a compelling read.

“Outline” first appears to offer a bleak view of writing and love — one character suggests that “[w]riters need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal’s fur,” while another understands relations between men and women as war. But the more Faye talks with various people, the more she begins to believe in the power of stories to inspire art and help heal relationships. She finds this strong parallel between writing and life. Much like individuals, “a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad . . . to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments.” Choices exist if we recognize that identity-shaping memories are not set but open to interpretation.

Faye waits for people to reveal themselves, and then asks questions. Greece is the perfect setting for the book’s central dilemma. While picturesque, it is also “a country that is on its knees and dying a slow and agonizing death.” People share with Faye postcard-worthy narratives that sound ideal; the real stories she excavates are rotten on the inside. Cusk reveals nostalgia, in particular, as an egotistical indulgence.

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Her male characters are especially guilty of idealizing early loves as a way of forestalling thoughts of mortality. How often do we meet someone and later believe the encounter was meant to be? For Faye, “[t]he unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate” but is meaningless until we hang narrative on it. The Greek bachelor believes his first marriage was the most authentic of his life. Faye challenges that it was “the loss of belief . . . that constituted his yearning for the old life,” not a longing for the relationship itself. When the person his wife has become fails to square with his fantasy, he feels “unreal.” His identity, shaped by his projection, collapses under the weight of new understanding. Another man strips his story of all tenderness: “[M]y wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion.” Such is the slippery nature of a love story.

“Outline’’ suggests that “the story of improvement . . . has commandeered our deepest sense of reality. It has even infected the novel.” Cusk’s refusal to transform her protagonist in any palpable way redeems the concept of narrative by destabilizing it. Faye, lacking desire, is a kind of anti-hero. She “did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything” but observes her world with delicate, haunting precision. A newborn baby has “a primitive whorl of hair.” A family glimpsed from afar is “the bright rotating circle on the jewellery box, so mechanically and fixedly constellated and yet so graceful and correct.”

Faye comes to understand, through her discussions with other artists, many of whom have experienced failed loved affairs and professional disappointments, that the sentimentality that permeates discussions of writing and love is a dilution of the true qualities of each. Love is lost as easily as it is found. To be a writer is a vocational choice no more august than the decision to be a plumber or a soldier, and herein lies hope. To be artistic or loving is to pay careful, apt attention to the moment, without thought to what’s next. This intersection between desire and self-understanding is where real art and true love lie.

Emily Rapp’s most recent book is “The Still Point of the Turning World.”

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Outline (Cusk)

Outline   Rachel Cusk, 2014 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 256 pp. ISBN-13: 9780374228347 Summary A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language . A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking—about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss. Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people’s motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk’s finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio • Birth—1967 • Where—Canada • Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA • Education—Oxford University • Awards—Whitbread Award; Somerset Maughm Award • Currently—lives in London Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles before finishing her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. She read English at New College, Oxford, and has travelled extensively in Spain and Central America. She is the author of eight novels, the first of which, Saving Agnes (1993), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her 2001 nonfiction exploration of motherhood, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother , generated considerable controversy. Some women accused Cusk of loathing her own children while others secretly felt the book mirrored their own troubled attitudes. Inspite of—or because of—the controversy, the book has been reprinted numerous times, with Lynn Barber of the UK's The Guardian regarding it as "probably the most powerful book on motherhood ever written." Her third novel, The Country Life (1997) won the Somerset Maughm Novel Award, while two other novels (see below) were shortlisted for literary prizes. In 2003, Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 Best of Young British Novelists. Cusk is divorced from her second husband, photographer Adrian Clarke, with whom she has two daughters, Albertine and Jessye. Cusk wrote in detail about the marriage in Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012); a review of the book by Camilla Long won Long the "Hatchet Job of the Year" award. Books 1993 - Saving Agnes (Whitbread First Novel Award) 1995 - The Temporary 1997- The Country Life (Somerset Maughm Novel Award) 2001 - A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother 2003 - The Lucky Ones (shortlisted, Whitbread Award) 2005 - In the Fold 2006 - Arlington Park (shortlisted, Orange Prize) 2009 - The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy 2009 - The Bradshaw Variation s 2012 - Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation 2014 - Outline ( Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/15/2015 .)

Book Reviews [L]ethally intelligent…. While the narrator is rarely alone, reading Outline mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk's literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this novel and you'll become convinced she is one of the smartest writers alive. Her narrator's mental clarity can seem so hazardously penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure. Cusk is also—this sounds ridiculous—but she is also noticeably an adult. She writes about adult topics with sagacity and authority. Well-worn subjects—adultery, divorce, ennui—become freshly menacing under her gaze. Heidi Julavits - New York Times Book Review [A] poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way of straightforward plot yet is transfixing in its unruffled awareness of the ways we love and leave each other, and of what it means to listen to other people…. While little happens in Outline , everything seems to happen. You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit. This is largely because the small conversations and monologues in  Outline are, at their best, as condensed and vivid as theater…. Ms. Cusk marshals a lot of gifts in this novel, and they are unconventional ones. With no straightforward narrative to hang onto, no moving in and out of rooms, she's left with the sound of her own mind, and it's a mind that is subtle, precise, melancholy. This is a novel with no wasted motion…Outline is a palate cleanser, an authoritative bit of clarifying acid, here when needed. Dwight Garner - New York Times Described as a "novel in ten conversations"...it turns out to be a　clever, fresh device that dispenses with the need for much of a plot and presents instead more of a lush human collage.... [A] rich, thoughtful read. Carol Midgley - (London) Times Outline  succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on to the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller.... [A] stellar accomplishment. James Lasdun - Guardian ( UK ) Outline . It defies ordinary categorisation. It is about authorial invisibility, it involves writing without showing your face. The narrator is a writer who goes to teach creative writing in Greece and becomes enmeshed in other peoples’ narratives which Cusk stitches, with fastidious brilliance, into a single fabric. Kate Kellaway - Guardian ( UK ) [T]his has to be one of the oddest, most breathtakingly original and unsettling novels I’ve read in a long time ... [E]very single word is earned, precisely tuned, enthralling. Outline is a triumph of attitude and daring, a masterclass in tone. Julie Myerson - Observer ( UK ) [A work] of great beauty and ambition. Narratives are smoothed, as if by translation and retranslation, into their simplest, barest elements: parents, children, divorces, cakes, dresses, dogs. These elements then build, layer on layer, to form the most complex and exquisitely detailed patterns, swirling and whirling, wheels within wheels. Jenny Turner - London Review of Books [A] uniquely graceful and innovative piece of artistic self-possession, which achieves the rare feat of seamlessly amalgamating form and substance. Lucy Scholes - Independent ( UK ) Cusk’s uncompromising, often brutal intelligence is at full power. So is her technique... I can’t think of a book that so powerfully resists summary or review.... Inevitably, the only way to get close to the fascinating and elusive core of  Outline is to read it. Sophie Elmhirst - Financial Times Never less than compelling...material that might have been ponderous in other hands is, here, magnetic, thanks to the mystery at the heart of Cusk’s book, her exquisite lightness of touch and her glinting wit. Stephanie Cross - Daily Mail ( UK ) The writing is brilliant.... Cusk is always cerebral but I've never noticed her drollery before...absorbing, thought-provoking. Claire Harman - London Evening Standard ( UK ) Cusk confounds expectations.... Outline is full of such wonderful surprises: subtle shifts in power and unexpectedly witty interludes. Elena Seymenliyska - Telegraph ( UK ) A tapestry of different voices, its shape emerging as if by happy accident.... [Outlin Outline e] is a clever thought experiment that’s far too readable ever to feel like one. Lidija Haas - Independent on Sunday ( UK ) ( Starred review .) On an airplane to Athens....Faye strikes up a conversation with the passenger... [and eventually] learns about his multiple marriages and troubled children. Thus begins this brilliant novel from Cusk...structure[d] around a series of dialogues between Faye and those she encounters on her travels. Publishers Weekly This book about love, loss, memory, and the lies we tell ourselves and others exudes a contemplative, melancholy atmosphere tempered by Britsh author Cusk’s wonderfully astute observations of people and the visual impressions created by her exquisitely strucutred sentences. — Sally Bissell Library Journal [T]he most compelling part of Outline is its undercurrent of rage.... [With] polished, analytical language. Cusk’s writing is lovely.... Outline is a smart ascetic exercise. — Hannah Tennant-Moore Bookforum ( Starred review .) Outline is an expertly crafted portrait that asks readers to look deeply into the text for discovery. Those who accept that challenge will be rewarded for the effort. Booklist The individual stories collectively suggest that self-knowledge is a poor substitute for happiness, but perhaps readers can find some hope from the narrator's admission that she can't shake "this desire to be free…despite having proved that everything about it was illusory." Dark, for sure, but rich in human variety and unsentimental empathy.. Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book: • How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips) • Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction • Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart) ( We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher .)

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Outline by Rachel Cusk, review: 'full of wonderful surprises'

Rachel Cusk’s daring use of an almost silent narrator speaks volumes

Rachel Cusk has mined her life so thoroughly in her books that it is tempting to view her new novel as a continuation of that narrative. While her fiction has hardly been without plaudits (the Whitbread first novel award in 1993 for Saving Agnes, the Somerset Maugham award in 1997 for The Country Life, the Orange prize shortlist in 2007 for Arlington Park), it is the non-fiction that has won her notoriety. Once A Life’s Work (2001) exposed her ambivalence as a mother, and Aftermath (2012) detailed the ugly break-up of her second marriage , Cusk’s status as a remorseless critic of modern womanhood was set.

That critique continues in Cusk’s eighth novel, Outline, but it’s delivered in a rather unusual way – via a narrator who hardly ever speaks. This narrator, a writer and divorced mother of two who goes to Athens to teach a writing course, is so self-effacing that her name, Faye (which, incidentally, means “doomed to die”), is discovered only by chance, towards the book’s end. However, rather than dangling the tantalising possibility that the narrator might be the author herself, this evasion has a much deeper significance, and comes to question one of the basic principles of feminism.

The novel’s title comes from a character who uses the word to describe herself: while talking to a man, and in response to his own firm views about himself, “she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank”. The man had told her about all the languages he spoke, and she’d been so fascinated that she’d asked more questions – about his childhood, his parents, his marriage. She herself is still reeling from a mugging in which her attacker tried to strangle her, but this doesn’t come up in their conversation; instead, the man ends up making her feel the “amorphousness – the changing of shapes” in her life as a woman.

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Outline is made up almost entirely of such eloquent and philosophical, if one-sided, conversations. If this novel were a film, it would be French. Someone, not always but usually a man, talks at length about himself while his companion, not always but usually a woman, listens attentively, only occasionally interjecting with a comment that is brief and perceptive. The talker takes that attention in his stride and makes use of its insights, though rarely reciprocates. Instead, he grows more voluble, while the listener quietly processes what is said.

On her flight to Athens, Faye finds herself next to a wealthy old Greek man with a great beak of a nose. He can talk for hours, and listens only after palpably reminding himself to do so. This man invites her to his boat, buys her lunch and, over the course of a few days, tells her ever more about himself, his three failed marriages, his troubled children, and his chequered career. He is pompous, contradictory, vain, where she is quiet, focused, polite – like an amphora, whose slender opening can accommodate a surprising volume. Like the other woman, she is revealed only in outline, in response to what others say. Her physical presence on the page tends towards the one-liner, while those who talk at her can go on for page-long paragraphs.

Then there are the students in the writing course. Faye listens patiently to their outlines – the stories they want to write, and the life narratives they try to form – but here at least she is paid to listen. It is only in conversation with old friends, with Greek editors, publishers and poets in the cafés and restaurants of Kolonaki Square, that Faye herself gets a platform. By then, so commonplace has it become for her remarks to pass without comment, that when one of her friends responds with further questions, it delivers the most amazing jolt.

That amazement is ours alone – Faye herself is beyond caring. Fielding urgent calls about lost skateboards and failed bank loans while trying to work, she wants nothing for herself, and – more to the point – has made peace with that fact. “I had come,” she says, “to believe more and more in the values of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.” Life’s disappointments have made her see it not as a narrative that makes sense, with a beginning, a middle and an end, but simply as a line, a chain of events, made up merely of the things we happen to notice.

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This question – who notices, and who gets noticed; who listens, and who gets listened to – is impossible to ignore, like a finger coming out of the book to jab us in the chest. Yet Faye herself is never angry, never shrill: Cusk confounds expectations by letting her heroine find power in invisibility. By rising quietly like a spirit from the chalk outline of her former self, she is no longer part of anyone’s narrative. She can finally become unchained from whatever might once have defined her.

Outline is full of such wonderful surprises: subtle shifts in power and unexpectedly witty interludes. There is a chapter in which Faye asks her students to come up with a story featuring an animal. A student called Penelope, who has described her life as a ceaseless round of ministering to her husband and children, recounts the story of Mimi, the dog her children begged for but which she – of course! – ends up looking after. As Mimi goes from a cute puppy to an unruly, gluttonous hound, the children get bored of it and Penelope grows resentful.

Mimi becomes the symbol of Penelope’s loss of freedom. She starts to hate Mimi, and begins to hit her, to which Mimi responds with increased unruliness. This toxic relationship culminates in a brilliant – and brilliantly described – scene involving a distracted Penelope, an elaborate birthday cake and a triumphant Mimi. But the only response Penelope gets when her story ends is from Theo, a fellow writing student, who says that “the problem was that she had chosen the wrong dog; he himself had a pug, and never experienced any difficulties”.

Those who still believe in narratives could read this novel as the latest instalment of Cusk’s own life story, the next chapter after A Life’s Work and Aftermath. The conversations in Outline circle around those same themes – of women and men, love and marriage, children and work, success and failure. Yet in the midst of the chatter of those binary opposites thrums the white noise of Faye, her assertive blankness a kind of ground zero for power politics. There is another way, Cusk seems to say – not behind enemy lines, but outside them.

Buy Outline by Rachel Cusk from the Telegraph Bookshop

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Outline: part 1, issue 207, winter 2013.

Illustrated by Samantha Hahn.

Before the flight I was invited for lunch at a London club with a billionaire I’d been promised had liberal credentials. He talked in his open-necked shirt about the new software he was developing that could help organizations identify the employees most likely to rob and betray them in the future. We were meant to be discussing a literary magazine he was thinking of starting up: unfortunately I had to leave before we arrived at that subject. He insisted on paying for a taxi to the airport, which was useful since I was late and had a heavy suitcase.

The billionaire had been keen to give me the outline of his life story, which had begun unprepossessingly and ended—obviously—with him ­being the relaxed, well-heeled man who sat across the table from me ­today. I wondered whether in fact what he wanted now was to be a writer, with the literary magazine as his entrée. A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it. This man had bought himself in, and out, of a great many things. He mentioned a scheme he was working on, to eradicate lawyers from people’s personal lives. He was also developing a blueprint for a floating wind farm big enough to ­accommodate the entire community of people needed to service and run it: the ­gigantic platform could be located far out to sea, thus removing the unsightly ­turbines from the stretch of coast where he was hoping to pilot the proposal and where, incidentally, he owned a house. On Sundays he played drums in a rock band, just for fun. He was expecting his eleventh child, which wasn’t as bad as it sounded when you considered that he and his wife had once adopted quadruplets from Guatemala. I was finding it difficult to assimilate everything I was being told. The waitresses kept bringing more things—oysters, relishes, special wines. He was easily distracted, like a child with too many Christmas presents. But when he put me in the taxi, he said, Enjoy yourself in Athens, though I didn’t remember telling him that was where I was going.

On the tarmac at Heathrow the plane full of people waited silently to be taken into the air. The air hostess stood in the aisle and mimed with her props as the recording played. We were strapped into our seats, a field of strangers, in a silence like the silence of a congregation while the liturgy is read. She showed us the life jacket with its little pipe, the emergency exits, the oxygen mask dangling from a length of clear tubing. She led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the ­congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time. Instead we listened or half listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been ­bestowed on us by this coupling of formality with doom. When the recorded voice came to the part about the oxygen masks, the hush remained unbroken: no one ­protested, or spoke up to disagree with this commandment that one should take care of others only after taking care of oneself. Yet I wasn’t sure it was altogether true.

On one side of me sat a swarthy boy with lolling knees, whose fat thumbs sped around the screen of a gaming console. On the other was a small man in a pale linen suit, richly tanned, with a silver plume of hair. Outside, the turgid summer afternoon lay stalled over the runway; little airport vehicles raced unconstrained across the flat distances, skating and turning and ­circling like toys, and farther away still was the silver thread of the motorway that ran and glinted like a brook bounded by the monotonous fields. The plane began to move, trundling forward so that the vista appeared to unfreeze into motion, flowing past the windows first slowly and then ­faster, until there was the feeling of effortful, half-hesitant lifting as it detached itself from the earth. There was a moment in which it seemed ­impossible that this could happen. But then it did.

The man to my right turned and asked me the reason for my visit to Athens. I said I was going there for work.

“I hope you are staying near water,” he said. “Athens will be very hot.”

I said I was afraid that was not the case, and he raised his eyebrows, which were silver and grew unexpectedly coarsely and wildly from his ­forehead, like grasses in a rocky place. It was this eccentricity that had made me answer him. The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.

“The heat has come early this year,” he said. “Normally one is safe until much later. It can be very unpleasant if you aren’t used to it.”

In the juddering cabin the lights flickered fitfully on; there was the sound of doors opening and slamming, and tremendous clattering noises, and people were stirring, talking, standing up. A man’s voice was talking over the intercom; there was a smell of coffee and food; the air hostesses stalked purposefully up and down the narrow carpeted aisle and their nylon stockings made a rasping sound as they passed. My neighbor told me that he made this journey once or twice a month. He used to keep a flat in London, in Mayfair, “but these days,” he said with a matter-of-fact set to his mouth, “I prefer to stay at the Dorchester.”

He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint. I asked him what his nationality was.

“I was sent to an English boarding school at the age of seven,” he replied. “You might say I have the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek. I am told,” he added, “it would be much worse the other way around.”

His parents were both Greeks, he continued, but at a certain moment they had relocated the whole household—themselves, four sons, their own parents, and an assortment of uncles and aunts—to London, and had begun to conduct themselves in the style of the English upper classes, sending the four boys away to school and establishing a home that became a forum for advantageous social connections, with an inexhaustible stream of aristocrats, politicians, and moneymakers crossing the threshold. I asked how it was that they had gained access to this foreign milieu, and he shrugged.

“Money is a country all its own,” he said. “My parents were ­shipowners—the family business was an international enterprise, despite the fact that we had lived until then on the small island where both of them were born, an island you would certainly not have heard of, despite its prolixity to some well-known tourist destinations.”

Proximity, I said. I think you mean proximity.

“I do beg your pardon,” he said. “I mean, of course, proximity.”

But like all wealthy people, he continued, his parents had long outgrown their origins and moved in a borderless sphere among other people of wealth and importance. They retained, of course, a grand house on the island, and that remained their domestic establishment while their children were young; but when the time came to send their sons to school, they relocated themselves to England, where they had many contacts, including some, he said rather ­proudly, that brought them at least to the peripheries of Buckingham Palace.

Theirs had always been the preeminent family of the island, he con­tinued: two strains of the local aristocracy had been united by the parental marriage, and, what’s more, two shipping fortunes consolidated. But the ­culture of the place was unusual in that it was matriarchal. It was women, not men, who held authority; property was passed not from father to son but from mother to daughter. This, my neighbor said, created familial tensions that were the obverse of those he encountered on his arrival in England. In the world of his childhood, a son was already a disappointment; he himself, the last in a long line of such disappointments, was treated with a special ambivalence, in that his mother wished to believe he was a girl. His hair was kept in long ringlets; he was clothed in dresses and called by the girl’s name his parents had chosen in expectation of being given at long last an heir. This unusual situation, my neighbor said, had ancient causes. From its earliest ­history, the island economy had revolved around the extraction of ­sponges from the sea bed, and the young men of the community had ­acquired the skill of deep diving out at sea. But it was a dangerous occupation and hence their life ­expectancy was extraordinarily low. In this situation, by the ­repeated death of husbands, the women had gained control of their financial affairs and, what’s more, had passed that control on to their daughters.

“It is hard,” he said, “to imagine the world as it was in the heyday of my parents, in some ways so pleasurable and in others so callous. For example, my parents had a fifth child, also a boy, whose brain had been damaged at birth, and when the household moved they simply left him there on the island, in the care of a succession of nurses whose credentials—in those days and from that distance—I’m afraid no one cared to investigate too closely.”

He lived there still, an aging man with the mind of an infant, unable, of course, to give his own side of the story. Meanwhile, my neighbor and his brothers entered the chilly waters of an English public-school education, learning to think and speak like English boys. My neighbor’s ringlets were clipped off, much to his relief, and for the first time in his life he experienced cruelty, and along with it certain new kinds of unhappiness: loneliness, homesickness, the longing for his mother and father. He rifled around in the breast pocket of his suit and took out a soft black leather wallet, from which he extracted a creased monochrome photograph of his parents: a man of rigidly upright bearing in a fitted sort of frock coat buttoned to the throat, whose parted hair and thick, straight brows and large scrolled ­mustache were so black as to give him an appearance of extraordinary ferocity; and beside him, a woman with an unsmiling face as round and hard and inscrutable as a coin. The photograph was taken in the late 1930s, my neighbor said, ­before he himself was born. The marriage was already unhappy, however, the father’s ferocity and the mother’s intransigence being more than cosmetic. Theirs was a tremendous battle of wills, in which no one ever succeeded in separating the combatants; except, very briefly, when they died. But that, he said with a faint smile, is a story for another time.

All this time, the air hostess had been advancing slowly along the aisle, pushing a metal trolley from which she was dispensing plastic trays of food and drink. She had now come to our row: she passed along the white ­plastic trays, and I offered one to the boy on my left, who lifted up his gaming console with both hands so that I could place it on the folded-down table in front of him. My right-hand neighbor and I lifted the lids of ours, so that tea could be poured into the white plastic cups that came with the trays. He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn. I said that I lived in London, having very recently moved from the house in the countryside where I had lived alone with my children for the past three years, and where, for the seven years before that, we had lived together with their father. It had been, in other words, our ­family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

There was a pause in which we drank our tea and ate the soft cake-like little biscuits that came with it. Through the windows was a purple near-­darkness. The engines roared steadily. The inside of the plane had become darker, too, intersected with beams from the overhead spotlights. It was ­difficult to study my neighbor’s face from the adjacent seat, but in the light-inflected darkness it had become a landscape of peaks and crevices, from the center of which rose the extraordinary hook of his nose, casting deep ravines of shadow on either side so that I could barely see his eyes. His lips were thin and his mouth wide and slightly gaping; the part between his nose and upper lip was long and fleshy and he touched it frequently, so that even when he smiled his teeth remained hidden. It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a ­marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting; we could no longer be found at the usual number, the usual address. My younger son, I told him, has the very ­annoying habit of immediately leaving the place where you have agreed to meet him, if you aren’t there when he arrives. Instead, he goes in search of you, and becomes frustrated and lost. I couldn’t find you! he cries afterward, invariably aggrieved. But the only hope of finding anything is to stay exactly where you are, at the agreed place. It’s just a question of how long you can hold out.

“My first marriage,” my neighbor said after a pause, “often seems to me to have ended for the silliest of reasons. When I was a boy I used to watch the hay carts coming back from the fields so overloaded it seemed a miracle they didn’t tip. They would jolt up and down and sway alarmingly from side to side, but amazingly they never went over. And then one day I saw it, the cart on its side, the hay spilled all over the place, people running around shouting. I asked what had happened and the man told me they had hit a bump in the road. I always remembered that,” he said, “how inevitable it seemed and yet how silly. And it was the same with my first wife and me,” he said. “We hit a bump in the road, and over we went.”

It had, he now realized, been a happy relationship, the most ­harmonious of his life. He and his wife had met and got engaged as teenagers; they had never argued, until the argument in which everything between them was broken. They had two children and had amassed considerable wealth: they had a large house outside Athens, a London flat, a place in Geneva; they had horses and skiing holidays and a forty-foot yacht moored in the ­waters of the Aegean. They were both still young enough to believe that this ­principle of growth was exponential; that life was only expansive and broke the ­successive vessels in which you tried to contain it in its need to expand more. After the argument, reluctant to move definitively out of the house, my neighbor went to live on the yacht in its mooring. It was summer and the yacht was luxurious; he could swim and fish and entertain friends. For a few weeks he lived in a state of pure illusion that was really numbness, like the numbness that follows an injury, before pain starts to make its way through it, slowly but relentlessly finding a path through the dense analgesic fog. The weather broke; the yacht became cold and uncomfortable. His wife’s father summoned him to a meeting at which he was asked to relinquish any claim on their shared assets, and he agreed. He believed he could afford to be generous, that he would make it all back again. He was thirty-six years old and still felt the force of exponential growth in his veins, of life straining to burst the vessel in which it had been contained. He could have it all again, with the difference that this time he would want what he had.

“Though I have discovered,” he said, touching his fleshy upper lip, “that that is harder than it sounds.”

It did not, of course, come to pass as he had imagined it. The bump in the road hadn’t only upset his marriage; it had caused him to veer off onto a different road altogether, a road that was but a long, directionless detour, a road he had no real business being on and that sometimes he still felt himself to be traveling even to this day. Like the loose stitch that causes the whole garment to unravel, it was hard to piece back this chain of events to its ­original flaw. Yet these events had constituted the majority of his adult life. It was nearly thirty years since his first marriage ended, and the further he got from that life, the more real it became to him. Or not real , exactly, he said—what had happened since had been real enough. The word he was looking for was authentic : his first marriage had been authentic in a way that nothing ever had again. The older he got, the more it represented to him a kind of home, a place to which he yearned to return. Though when he ­remembered it honestly, and even more so when he actually spoke to his first wife—which these days was rarely—the old feelings of constriction would return. All the same, it seemed to him now that that life had been lived ­almost unconsciously, that he had been lost in it, absorbed in it, as you can be absorbed in a book, believing in its events and living entirely through and with its characters. Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; never again had he been able to believe in that way. Perhaps it was that—the loss of belief—that constituted his yearning for the old life. Whatever it was, he and his wife had built things that flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this—he now saw—was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more.

More what? I asked.

“More—life,” he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. “And more affection,” he added, ­after a pause. “I wanted more affection.”

He replaced the photograph of his parents in his wallet. There was now blackness at the windows. In the cabin, people were reading, sleeping, ­talking. A man in long, baggy shorts walked up and down the aisle jiggling a baby on his shoulder. The plane seemed stilled, almost motionless; there was so little interface between inside and outside, so little friction, that it was hard to believe we were moving forward. The electric light, with the absolute darkness outside, made people look very fleshly and real, their detail so unmediated, so impersonal, so infinite. Each time the man with the baby passed, I saw the network of creases in his shorts, his freckled arms covered in coarse reddish fur, the pale, mounded skin of his midriff where his T-shirt had ridden up, and the tender, wrinkled feet of the baby on his shoulder, the little hunched back, the soft head with its primitive whorl of hair.

My neighbor turned to me again and asked me what work it was that was taking me to Athens. For the second time, I felt the conscious effort of his inquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp. I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its ­consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing—a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball—and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, nor did their distress. I always ­expected that at some point they would realize the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and for the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.

I told him I was a writer, and was going to Athens for a couple of days to teach a course at a summer school there. The course was entitled “How to Write”: a number of different writers were teaching it, and since there is no one way to write I supposed we would give the students contradictory advice. They were mostly Greeks, I had been told, though for the purposes of this course they were expected to write in English. Other people were skeptical about that idea but I didn’t see what was wrong with it. They could write in whatever language they wanted: it made no difference to me. Sometimes the loss of transition became the gain of simplicity. Teaching was just a way of making a living, I said. But I had one or two friends in Athens I might see while I was there.

A writer, my neighbor said, inclining his head in a gesture that could have conveyed either respect for the profession or a total ignorance of it. I had noticed, when I first sat down beside him, that he was reading a well-thumbed Wilbur Smith: this, he now said, was not entirely representative of his reading tastes, though it was true he lacked discrimination where ­fiction was concerned. His interest was in books of information, of facts and the interpretation of facts, and he was confident that he was not ­unsophisticated here in his preferences. He could recognize a fine prose style; one of his ­favorite writers, for example, was John Julius Norwich. But in fiction, ­admittedly, he was uneducated. He removed the Wilbur Smith from the seat pocket, where it still remained, and plunged it into the briefcase at his feet so that it was out of sight, as though wishing to disown it, or perhaps thinking I might forget I had seen it. As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition—I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew ­personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

“My second wife,” my neighbor said presently, “had never read a book in her life.”

She was absolutely ignorant, he continued, even of basic history and geography, and would say the most embarrassing things in company without any sense of shame at all. On the contrary, it angered her when people spoke of things she had no knowledge of: when a Venezuelan friend came to visit, for instance, she refused to believe that such a country existed because she had never heard of it. She herself was English, and so exquisitely ­beautiful it was hard not to credit her with some inner refinement; but though her nature did contain some surprises, they were not of a particularly pleasant kind. He often invited her parents to stay, as though by studying them he might decipher the mystery of their daughter. They would come to the ­island, where the ancestral home still remained, and would stay for weeks at a time. Never had he met people of such extraordinary blandness, such featurelessness: however much he exhausted himself with trying to stimulate them, they were as unresponsive as a pair of armchairs. In the end he became very fond of them, as one can become fond of armchairs; particularly the father, whose boundless reticence was so extreme that gradually my neighbor came to understand that he must suffer from some form of psychic injury. It moved him to see someone so injured by life. In his younger days he almost certainly wouldn’t even have noticed the man, let alone pondered the causes of his silence; and in this way, in recognizing his father-in-law’s suffering, he recognized his own. It sounds trivial, yet it could almost be said that through this recognition he felt his whole life turning on its axis: the history of his self-will appeared to him, by a simple revolution in perspective, as a moral journey. He had turned around, like a climber turns around and looks back down the mountain, reviewing the path he has traveled, no longer immersed in the ascent.

A long time ago—so long that he had forgotten the author’s name—he read some memorable lines in a story about a man who is trying to ­translate another story, by a much more famous author. In these lines—which, my neighbor said, he still remembers to this day—the translator says that a ­sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to ­establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle-age my neighbor began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living. Everywhere he looked he saw people as it were ruined by the extremity of their own experiences, and his new parents-in-law appeared to be a case in point. What was clear, in any case, was that their daughter had mistaken him for a far wealthier man: the fatal yacht, on which he had hidden out as a marital escapee and which was his sole remaining asset from that time, had lured her. She had a great need for luxury and he began to work as he never had before, blindly and frantically, spending all his time in meetings and on airplanes, negotiating and securing deals, taking on more and more risk in order to provide her with the wealth she took for granted was there.   He was, in effect, manufacturing an illusion: no matter what he did, the gap between illusion and reality could never be closed. Gradually, he said, this gap, this distance between how things were and how I wanted them to be, began to undermine me. I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

It was now that the propriety of his first wife, the health and ­prosperity of their family life and the depth of their shared past, began to smite him. The first wife, after a period of unhappiness, had married again: she had ­become, after their divorce, quite fixated on skiing, going to northern Europe and the mountains whenever she could, and before long had declared herself married to an instructor in Lech who had given her back, so she said, her confidence. That marriage, my neighbor admitted, remained intact to this day. But back in the time of its inception, my neighbor had begun to realize he had made a mistake and had endeavored to restore contact with his first wife, with what intentions he wasn’t quite clear. Their two children, a boy and a girl, were still quite small: it was reasonable enough, after all, that they should be in touch. Dimly he remembered that in the period immediately following their separation, it was she who was always trying to get hold of him; and remembered, too, that he had avoided her calls, intent as he was on the pursuit of the woman who was now his second wife. He was unavailable, gone into a new world in which his first wife appeared barely to exist, in which she was a kind of ridiculous cardboard figure whose actions—so he persuaded himself and others—were the actions of a madwoman. But now it was she who could not be found: she was plunging down cold, white mountainsides in the Arlberg, where he did not exist for her any more than she had existed for him. She didn’t answer his calls, or answered them curtly, distractedly, saying she had to go. She could not be called upon to recognize him, and this was the most bewildering thing of all, for it made him feel absolutely unreal. It was with her, after all, that his identity had been forged: If she no longer recognized him, then who was he?

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In Memoriam

The art of fiction no. 178.

In 1985, after seventeen New York publishers had rejected  City of Glass , the lead novella in The New York Trilogy, it was published by Sun and Moon Press in San Francisco. The other two novellas,  Ghosts  and  The Locked Room , came out the next year. Paul Auster was thirty-eight. Although he wrote reviews and translations regularly and his prose poem  White Spaces had been published in 1980, the trilogy marked the true start of his literary career.

   Auster has written about those prepublication years in  Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure  (1997). He studied at Columbia University in the late sixties, then worked for a few months on an oil tanker before moving to Paris where he eked out a living as a translator. He started a little magazine,  Little Hand , and an independent publishing house of the same name with his first wife, the writer Lydia Davis. In 1972 his first book, a collection of translations titled  A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems , was published. He returned to New York City in 1974 and, among other ventures, tried to sell a baseball card game he had invented. In 1982, Auster published his first prose book,  The Invention of Solitude , a memoir and meditation on fatherhood that he started writing shortly after his father’s death.

   Auster has published a book almost annually since the trilogy: In 1987 the novel  In the Country of Last Things  appeared. His other novels include  Moon Palace  (1989),  The Music of Chance  (1990),  Leviathan  (1992), and  The Book of Illusions  (2002). Auster was made a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991 (he was elevated to an officer in 1997).

   The range of Auster’s work is remarkable—novels, essays, translations, poems, plays, songs, and collaborations with artists (including Sophie Calle and Sam Messer). He has also written three screenplays:  Smoke  (1995),  Blue in the Face  (1995), and  Lulu on the Bridge (1998), which he directed as well.  Oracle Night , his ninth novel, will be published later this year.

   The following conversation started last fall with a live interview at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The interview was completed one afternoon this summer at Auster’s home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt. A gracious host, he apologized for the workers who were installing central air conditioning in their nineteenth-century brownstone, then gave a brief tour: The living room is decorated with paintings by his friends Sam Messer and David Reed. In their front hall, there is a collection of family photographs. Bookshelves line the walls of his office on the ground floor. And, of course, on his desk the famous typewriter.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s start by talking about the way you work. About how you write.

PAUL AUSTER

I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil—especially for corrections. If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

And you write in notebooks. Not legal pads or loose sheets of paper.

Yes, always in notebooks. And I have a particular fetish for notebooks with quadrille lines—the little squares.

But what about the famous Olympia typewriter? We know quite a bit about that machine—last year you published a wonderful book with the painter Sam Messer,  The Story of My Typewriter .

I’ve owned that typewriter since 1974—more than half my life now. I bought it second-hand from a college friend and at this point it must be about forty years old. It’s a relic from another age, but it’s still in good condition. It’s never broken down. All I have to do is change ribbons every once in a while. But I’m living in fear that a day will come when there won’t be any ribbons left to buy—and I’ll have to go digital and join the twenty-first century.

A great Paul Auster story. The day when you go out to buy that last ribbon.

I’ve made some preparations. I’ve stocked up. I think I have about sixty or seventy ribbons in my room. I’ll probably stick with that typewriter till the end, although I’ve been sorely tempted to give it up at times. It’s cumbersome and inconvenient, but it also protects me against laziness.

Because the typewriter forces me to start all over again once I’m finished. With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an incredibly tedious process. You’ve finished your book, and now you have to spend several weeks engaged in the purely mechanical job of transcribing what you’ve already written. It’s bad for your neck, bad for your back, and even if you can type twenty or thirty pages a day, the finished pages pile up with excruciating slowness. That’s the moment when I always wish I’d switched to a computer, and yet every time I push myself through this final stage of a book, I wind up discovering how essential it is. Typing allows me to experience the book in a new way, to plunge into the flow of the narrative and feel how it functions as a whole. I call it “reading with my fingers,” and it’s amazing how many errors your fingers will find that your eyes never noticed. Repetitions, awkward constructions, choppy rhythms. It never fails. I think I’m finished with the book and then I begin to type it up and I realize there’s more work to be done.

Let’s go back to the notebooks for a minute. Quinn, in  City of Glass , records his observations in a red notebook. Anna Blume, the narrator of  In the Country of Last Things , composes her letter in a blue notebook. In  Mr. Vertigo , Walt writes his autobiography in thirteen hardbound school composition books. And Willy G. Christmas, the demented hero of  Timbuktu , has lugged his entire life’s work to Baltimore to give to his high-school English teacher before he dies: seventy-four notebooks of “poems, stories, essays, diary entries, epigrams, autobiographical musings, and the first eighteen-hundred lines of an epic-in-progress,  Vagabond Days .” Notebooks also figure in your most recent novels,  The Book of Illusions  and  Oracle Night . To say nothing of your collection of true stories,  The Red Notebook . What are we to make of this?

I suppose I think of the notebook as a house for words, as a secret place for thought and self-examination. I’m not just interested in the results of writing, but in the process, the act of putting words on a page. Don’t ask me why. It might have something to do with an early confusion on my part, an ignorance about the nature of fiction. As a young person, I would always ask myself, Where are the words coming from? Who’s saying this? The third-person narrative voice in the traditional novel is a strange device. We’re used to it now, we accept it, we don’t question it anymore. But when you stop and think about it, there’s an eerie, disembodied quality to that voice. It seems to come from nowhere and I found that disturbing. I was always drawn to books that doubled back on themselves, that brought you into the world of the book, even as the book was taking you into the world. The manuscript as hero, so to speak.  Wuthering Heights  is that kind of novel.  The Scarlet Letter  is another. The frames are fictitious, of course, but they give a groundedness and credibility to the stories that other novels didn’t have for me. They posit the work as an illusion—which more traditional forms of narrative don’t—and once you accept the “unreality” of the enterprise, it paradoxically enhances the truth of the story. The words aren’t written in stone by an invisible author-god. They represent the efforts of a flesh-and-blood human being and this is very compelling. The reader becomes a participant in the unfolding of the story—not just a detached observer.

From the Archive, Issue 167

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Outline by Rachel Cusk, book review: What it means to be a woman

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Outline, Rachel Cusk's eighth novel, is a compelling study of invisibility, silence and absence. An all but nameless female narrator travels to Athens to teach a writing course in the height of the summer heat.

We learn, however, practically nothing about her; instead, through her, we play audience to the chorus of voices that constitute the week she spends in the Greek city, as, one after the other, the people she meets unburden their life stories onto her blankness.

Authorial invisibility is a bold and unique premise for a first-person novel, especially one written by a writer who has made the confessional genre very much her own. I'm thinking here of course of Cusk's warts-and-all memoirs, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother and the more recent Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, both, particularly the latter, eliciting strong condemnation from readers and critics alike. Given Outline is the follow-up, as it were, to Aftermath, it's near impossible not to transpose something of Cusk herself onto her narrator; to read this meditation on authorial silence and female invisibility as the logical reaction to the outpouring of emotion and anger, not to mention the furious responses this provoked, that preceded it.

Out of the narratives that are spun around the narrator, certain themes begin to develop – marriage and separation, the ties of parenthood, the struggles of reconciling these with one's identity, particularly when it comes to creative expression – and through these, the faint image of a woman quivers into half-focus. Like the non-fiction that came before it Outline is a book about what it means to be a woman, but in it Cusk has transformed sentiment that was derided as gushing self-obsession and self-pity into a uniquely graceful and innovative piece of artistic self-possession, which achieves the rare feat of seamlessly amalgamating form and substance.

That the composition of the novel itself so clearly and crisply renders the idea behind it brought to my mind the completion of Lily Briscoe's painting at the close of Woolf's To the Lighthouse – not least because the concern of both writers is female subjectivity.

The final 'story' in the novel is that told by a fellow writer come to take the narrator's place, a woman who's experienced a near complete loss of identity following a violent mugging. As she tells the narrator of how she listened to her neighbour on the plane telling her about his life, she eloquently elucidates the process by which Cusk's entire novel works: "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." And indeed, more than any tendrils of description or character it was a sense of shape and structure that lingered in my mind long after I'd turned the final page, rendering Cusk's novel something of a visual work of art, as when a sculptor works to slowly chip away at excess stone to reveal the form they know exists within the single block of marble. "Yes," one can almost hear Cusk whisper echoing Lily's final words, "I have had my vision."

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Sam’s Substack

The Outline Trilogy: Outline, Transit and Kudos

Rachel cusk.

608 pages, Paperback

Published August 20, 2019

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Compassion is the true test of a person in 'second place'.

Heller McAlpin

Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, which so brilliantly pushed against the confines of fiction to explore the power of narrative, left us wondering what she would write next. Would she go back to her earlier, more conventional satires of the stresses of family life? Or would she continue to probe questions about the connection between freedom and gender and art and suffering in serial conversations with strangers?

The Outline trilogy is a hard act to follow, but Second Place is an excellent next step. A writer we know only as M delivers a long monologue relaying the story of her obsession with a famous painter dubbed L. Unlike the trilogy, it is neither episodic nor plotless. Essentially, it's a domestic novel combined with a novel of ideas in which Cusk continues her cerebral exploration of issues of freedom, how art can both save and destroy us, the rub between self-sacrifice and self-definition in motherhood, and the possibilities of domestic happiness.

Second Place traces the arc of M's fraught relationship with L, beginning with the moment, as an unhappy "young mother on the brink of rebellion," she first saw his paintings in a Paris gallery. Later on, she tells L she was so struck by the sense of freedom his landscapes emitted that they gave her the courage to change her life. But instead of freedom after leaving her disapproving husband, the immediate result was the loss of her home, money, friends, and, for a year, her daughter, then just four years old. (This, of course, is somewhat akin to Cusk's experience in the aftermath of her first marriage, which she chronicled with blistering fury in Aftermath , garnering harsh opprobrium , in part for what was seen as her anti-domestic stance.)

'Transit' Is A Journey You Won't Want To End

'Coventry' Touches On Gender, Self-Definition In Taking Control Of One's Narrative

Fifteen years after these dark times, M is happily married to Tony, a large, loving, uncomplicated, outdoorsy man who "didn't believe in art — he believed in people, their goodness and their badness, and he believed in nature." They live comfortably on the isolated English coastal marsh where he was brought up by his adoptive family. Yet she continues to think about the visceral connection she felt with L through his work, and invites him to stay in their guest cottage in the woods, which they call the Second Place.

What follows is a dramatic account of a difficult guest's effect on his intense hostess and her family, including Tony and the narrator's grown daughter, Justine, as told after the fact to someone named Jeffers. We have no idea who Jeffers is, but rather irritatingly, Cusk repeats his name every few pages, lest we suspect that she's speaking into a void: "Do you understand it, Jeffers? I have wanted to be free my whole life but haven't managed to liberate my smallest toe," she writes. Many pages later she asks, "Does catastrophe have the power to free us, Jeffers?" The conceit feels forced.

The drama of the ruthless artist is not new, but as plumbed by the ever-probing Cusk, it still feels rich. That said, some readers may lose patience with M's ungrateful artist-in-residence — who sneers at her "little books" and insultingly asks why she "[plays] at being a woman" — and with M's fixation on him.

In an author's note, Cusk credits Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan's 1932 memoir about the time D.H. Lawrence (one of Cusk's literary touchstones) came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico, as an inspiration. Cusk actually presaged the relationship between writer M and artist L in Transit, the middle volume of her trilogy, when a blocked writing student tells the narrator, Faye, about her obsession with American painter Marsden Hartley, who seemed to channel her acute loneliness. Faye told her student, "It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist's vision ... Like life, I said, being understood created the fear that you will never be understood again."

As always, Cusk doggedly teases out her complex, occasionally mind-numbing concerns. There's also some beautiful prose. A description of Paris is surprisingly Hemingway-esque: "The sky got bluer and more blue and the green fresh banks of foliage were motionless in the warmth, and the blocks of light and shadow that bisected the streets were like the eternal primordial shapes that lie on the faces of mountain ranges and seem to come from inside them."

M describes Tony's surprisingly effusive courtship letters as "this sparkling river of words that flowed through me and irrigated me and began to bring me slowly back to life" — and also allowed her "ever after to live with his silence, because I know the river is there."

Cusk's narrator is tough minded — similar to how the author herself comes across in her recent essay collection, Coventry (2019). But although she still values truth-telling over likability, she's softened somewhat — at least on the evidence of Second Place. M's appreciation for Tony, and for her daughter's blossoming into maturity, help her weigh the wages of art on more finely tuned scales. Although Cusk doesn't explicitly address specific instances of artists who have been called out for their reprehensible behavior, her novel channels a moral reckoning we see taking place more widely in our culture. Even in artists, her narrator comes to realize, "The truest test of a person is the test of compassion."