Review: Outline - Rachel Cusk

A guest review by Jayne White

I’ve had this book on my radar for a while before I got around to reading it. As is often the case in this situation I’ve found that I’ve absorbed quite a bit about the book before I’ve even opened it from all the reviews and mentions it’s had. This novel was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize last year and has also been shortlisted for the Folio Prize. Consequently it’s been much talked about. Interestingly, it’s a book which although fairly universally praised is perceived differently by each reader. There’s a lengthy quote on the front cover of my copy from Jeffrey Eugenides which says “...nearly nameless narrator flickers into visibility only through her encounters with a series of amazingly eloquent and fascinating interlocutors…” and “Cusk manages to describe the painful realities of women’s lives by a process of erasure that is in itself responsible for that suffering.” James Lasdun (Guardian) praises it as “a miniature tour de force of human portraiture and storytelling virtuosity”. Julie Myerson (Observer) states “This is no wry comedy of conversations but a cool-headed meditation on the doomed nature of relationships, on the perennial and devastating distance that exists between people…”

Whilst I can see where the other reviewers are coming from, for me, the novel was principally an exploration of the psychology of story or the human need to understand events as part of a narrative. Faye, the narrative character, who is as Eugenides says, ‘nearly nameless’ is a writer who flies to Athens to run a series of writing workshops. She reports on the conversations she has with the characters she meets along the way.  Firstly she meets a go-getting businessman who wants to impress her with his rags to riches tale. Later she meets an older Greek man from a wealthy family but in more reduced circumstances now thanks to two - or as we later discover - three failed marriages. The narrator challenges his stories, analysing them as if they were fiction and he accepts her comments, admitting that he has missed bits out which reflect badly on him. She meets other writers and writing students while in Athens. They also tell Faye their stories and we get to sit in on some of her classes with her ‘mixed bag’ of students where they ponder the nature of stories:

“... 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 saw the tendency to fictionalise our own experiences as positively dangerous, because it convinced us that human life was some sort of design and that we were more significant than we actually were.”

Towards the end of the novel Faye meets another author who has had a traumatic experience that she can’t yet tell as a coherent story and whose ability to write seems to have deserted her. I think this reflects the narrator’s own situation. She reveals bits of story in that she mentions to other characters she has been divorced and has children back in England and that she wants a new mortgage. We also see how she notices her surroundings; how she watches families and particularly fathers interacting with their children. She reflects on her children’s squabbles:

“The story of who had done what to whom had to be told, and the matters of guilt and punishment established, though this never satisfied them either; in fact it made things worse, because it seemed to promise a resolution that never came.”

This novel is an outstanding piece of writing. Although it has 257 pages, which is a perfectly respectable length for a novel, it has something of the quality of a novella about it in that there is no waste or filler, every part of it is a part of the whole and has a purpose. The only slight criticism I have is that the reported speech style can feel a little monotonous in places - but this might be just to make you glad that you’re not the one sitting down to eat with the character who is telling their story. Having said that I think the richness of this novel means that it’s one you could sit down with again time after time and notice something new on each reading; so I definitely recommend it.

Jayne White is a freelance copywriter and proof-reader. Follow her on Twitter: @elethawhite