Fifty Books Project 2023

 

Outline by Rachel Cusk

 

It was interesting to consider, said the long-haired boy – Georgeou, as my diagram now told me – that a story might merely be a series of events we believe ourselves to be involved in, but on which we have absolutely no influence at all.  He himself had noticed nothing on his journey here:  he habitually did not notice things which did not concern him, for that very reason, that he saw the tendency to fictionalize our own experiences as positively dangerous, because it convinced us that human life had some kind of design and that we were more significant than we actually were.

 

 

It is possible that every novel contains, or manifests, a theory of the novel – even if most of them accept the prevailing theory of their time.  Dickens was all about convincing us that human life had some kind of design and that were more significant than we might appear to ourselves at any given moment.  Hemingway liked the first part of that but disagreed with that last part, while Toni Morrison accepted both halves of the premise, though she saw multiple designs competing to influence our views of our selves and our lives.  

 

Rachel Cusk seems to view these patterns as most powerful when they go unnoticed.  Outline can be described as an experimental novel in that it powerfully and beautifully offers many of the elements of the novel – characters are fully rendered and deeply human, the language is lovely and very literary, and themes emerge effortlessly from the various encounters and conversations that make up the text.  Those encounters and conversations are all that she offers in the way of plot, however.  It is reminiscent of the work of Ben Lerner, and may also be faithfully autobiographical, though it takes on a much smaller slice of life and renders it with more quotidian detail.

 

Faye, the narrator, is a writer who is travelling from her home in London to Athens to teach a one week writing class.  She meets a man on the plane and they strike up a minor friendship centered on his taking her out on his small boat to go swimming.  She has friends, colleagues and previous acquaintances in Athens and meets some of them for coffee, drinks, and lunch.  She has ten students in her class and they tell stories about themselves and reflect on the purpose of writing in response to her prompts.  The week goes by.  The man she met on the plane (who remains unnamed and referred to as her “neighbor” throughout) makes a pass at her and their budding friendship is stunted.  One of her students drops her class after condemning her work as a teacher.  She gets a phone call from her son who is walking to school alone for the first time and gets lost.  She gets another phone call from a banker informing her she has been turned down for a loan.  The next writer arrives to live in her borrowed apartment and she leaves for the airport.  Nothing more dramatic happens.  The arc here is more like a gentle undulation.

 

However, in each of the ten chapters, there is a conversation recounted, and here certain themes become apparent.  Many of the people she spends time with have some level of marital problems.  Looking back on their lives they see that their relationships changed in subtle ways that in retrospect are important.  Her neighbor from the plane has been married three times and confesses that he was happiest with his first wife but in his youth thought the story of his life demanded more passion and adventure.  Looking back, he wishes he had accepted the stability and recognized its importance to his happiness.  Another man admits that he and his wife flirt with other people, that they are no longer each other’s main erotic interest.  One woman recalls a lost relationship with the line “Looking back, those were some of best times of her life, though at the time they had had the feeling of a prelude, a period of waiting, as though for the real drama of living to begin.”

 

Through these conversations and her reactions to the stories people tell her, we deduce that the narrator is recently divorced, that she has travelled with her husband before but that this trip alone is a relatively new experience for her.  While she sometimes holds out hope for love and happiness in her dialogue, she is also adjusting to the loss of her marriage and the self that inhabited that phase of her life.  At one point she praises the “virtues of passivity,” suggesting that trying too hard to do something might lead to success in that venture, but would involve “forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go.”  All this is involved in her realization that there is a difference “between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have.”  

 

The final conversation is with the playwright who will teach the next week’s seminar and stay in the same apartment.  This woman is in the midst of a psychic and professional crisis.  Shortly after breaking up with her husband, she is mugged.  While her ex is sympathetic, he does not step up to help her and she is forced to recognize that change in her life.  This has provoked a crisis in her ability to write.  Her plays now seem to be unnecessary structures of words.  She says “drama became something real to me,” and that “the truth had to be represented:  it couldn’t be left to represent itself.”  At this point the airplane neighbor, his sexual advance freshly rebuffed, attempts to reset their friendship with a boat ride, but it is too late, the narrator must head for her plane home.  In his response, he confuses the words “solicitude” and “solitude” and the two words suddenly seem to be antonyms – that relationships involve being solicitous of each other’s needs.  The rest is loneliness.  It seems that the writer and the neighbor have learned to accept the difference between what she wants and what she can have.

 

While all this is not happening, the various characters are beautifully rendered, the conversations flow briskly and the city – its heat and lethargy, the beauty of the water and minute sensations this produces in the author – becomes real and three dimensional.  I found myself reading with the page turning excitement I might bring to a much more plot-oriented book.  It is a page-turner even after you realize that the next page is pretty much like this page.