A captivating text, if anything
Rachel Cusk’s writing has this remarkable quality of revisitation even in addressing the present. To review ‘Outline’ then, with honesty, would be to undertake an analysis of its atmospheric traits, rather than to limn its amorphous yet chiselled plot. Indeed, Cusk’s novel reads as an essayistic meditation on love and humanity rather than a device predicated on incident or sequence. At no point does the text feel truncated or unmeasured, it encourages fluid conjoinings, exhaustive flourishes; it is a radiant organism. Cusk clearly hopes to beguile the type of reader who is enlightened and not averse to solipsism. Cusk’s narrator, Faye, who is teaching a writing course in Athens, comes alive to us solely through her conversations with other characters. Few things in her person, strike the reader, she is barely present. Though our narrator’s name or opinion are hardly mentioned in the text, one feels that she befits the role of an interlocutor of a larger subconscious, drawing out fretful confessions and life-aphorisms. Cusk never strays toward a hyper-intellectualisation of form, with a kind of innate sagacity she overwrites temporality, and assumptions of what a novel should be. Throughout the reader is aware that this is a work of staunch self-sufficiency, delineated with a kind of beautiful arrogance.
Cusk possesses one of those rare virtues; a nobility of tone that is effortlessly modulated. Her questioning of the life-prerogatives of each of her characters is incessant yet tender
There are strange but enriching conversations throughout the book. Faye’s neighbour on her flight to Athens becomes the medium through which profound truths are revealed on the nature of marriage. The presence of this Greek millionaire, thrice divorced, continues to the very end of the novel. He is a man who is besotted by that initial flare of attraction, loses passion along the way and is now alone. His pontifications are deluded, ego-generated and he continually self-actualises his fear of abandonment. His marriages, thus, break up with terrifying regularity and he is left parched of that ardour which he so richly desires. At one point he betrays his tiredness; ‘Family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn’t divorce it would be something else. Even if you lived like a saint you would still experience the same losses, however much you tried to explain them away’. Trapped in an abysmal rut, he longs to discover a love that will soothe his roving ways, naive to the fact that he is in love with the very restlessness that he wishes to subsume. His description of his second wife’s bracingly arctic manner, her contempt for his vitality are alarming in their selfish inobjectivity. The ‘neighbour’ then is the intermediary through which Cusk verbalises a contagious unrest of sorts; a sickness that floods its bearer with a kind of metaphysical homesickness.
Cusk possesses one of those rare virtues; a nobility of tone that is effortlessly modulated. Her questioning of the life-prerogatives of each of her characters is incessant yet tender. Faye is plagued by the kind of unsurety that is not your basic low self-esteem but self-abnegating, foul, vertiginous doubt. Faye transcribes this uncertainty, this prolix tension to no one but herself. She does not partake of her surroundings but instead invests her environs with the bounty of her reflections. Faye is a character that inspires oxymorons; she prides herself on being a ‘creative’, prone to a melange of dreams, a characteristic that is strangely at odds with her professed ennui.
Our introduction to the writing clan, that Faye is teaching, is conducted without a sliver of wryness. Each of the students pours out personal stories, which are both fabulously dark and affecting. In reply to her prompt of whether they noticed anything intriguing on their way to class, a girl named Clio, a failed musician, answers with a disquisition on the pathos of unfulfilled dreams. On her way to the tutorial she passes an open window, with someone practicing the D-minor fugue from Bach’s French suites, upon hearing this she feels the ‘most extraordinary sense of loss. It was as though the music had once belonged to her and now no longer did; as though she had been excluded from its beauty, was forced to see it in the possession of someone else, and to revisit in its entirety her own sadness at her inability to remain in that world’. The figures in ‘Outline’ are egregiously unselfconsciousness and generous with their disappointments and rancour, a trait that the narrator herself does not share. Tales are recounted with complex gravitas and without recourse to plot. Cusk smoothly captures this mass of material with admirable skill and with a kind of cinematic objectivity. Another particularly successful chapter involves another prompt, where Faye asks her students to recount their experiences with pets or other animals. In doing so, Faye exposes, really the moral compass of those in her tutelage. One student Penelope, in dealing with a mischievous pet, commits an act of hideous rage, that is heartbreaking to read. Even at the expression of such frank cruelty, there is no gesticulation of surprise or horror from Faye or the rest of the class. One feels that Cusk has, with curious officiousness, created this ellipses at the core of the text, this fluid energy where no narrative is shocking enough to deserve the inevitability of judgment. Such, fragments of memory, as the story above, give the text a peculiar translated quality; the narrator unconsciously gives away the extent of her lassitude by doing away altogether with the necessity of self-reflection and, perhaps, atonement.
The arrival of Elena, a friend of Faye’s, who is an editor at a publishing company is a welcome departure from the writing class. She is described as ‘Lorelei-like, composed of entirely curves and waves’
The arrival of Elena, a friend of Faye’s, who is an editor at a publishing company is a welcome departure from the writing class. She is described as ‘Lorelei-like, composed of entirely curves and waves’. Elena is the kind of executive who is in the business of winning both hearts and minds. Her conversations with Faye and with their poetess friend who joins them is a deconstruction of the intimacy between men and women. Elena is refreshingly forthright and holds forth quite cogently on the games men play in luring their target; ‘Men like to play this game. And they actually fear your honesty, because then the game is spoiled. By not being honest with a man you allow him to continue his game, to live in his fantasy’. Elena is frustrated by the fantastical notions of love that both sexes share, she wishes to love clear-willed, if you will and without the crutch of delusion. There is a collective apathetic response of the three women to the matter of love. They feel its circuitous parlance as opposed to life itself. The avowal of such exhaustion thus affirms Faye’s rejection of the Greek businessman’s advances. She feels justly embittered and wishes only to pleasantly regress into solitude.
In conclusion, Cusk’s novel can be deemed un-missable for the erudite, mediative reader. Her artistry is evident throughout and the register of her prose is utterly translucent. All her characters are imbued with a vulnerability and all are gracious in their confessions. The writing of this book seems an almost therapeutic act of retrieval for the author, an act of recognising the impossibility of living without a type of artful despair. Though a relatively short read, Cusk addresses themes of life defining magnitude. In a delivery that is both limpid and emphatic Cusk brings to life the self that is defined by excision. Her characters all seem to have found life, almost parenthetical to that trope of fulfilment that none can seem to access. Faye wishes for a life free of a kind of spiritual greed, free of the ‘nausea’ of achievement. She wishes to return to herself, desperately, but is unsure of where that self is now moored. This is a novel that is life-affirming for all its seeming antagonism to the fact of fraying progress. A captivating text for those looking for an antidote to the superfluous world.
Outline
Written by: Rachel Cusk
Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages: 256; Price: $20.90 (Hardcover), $12:00 (Paperback)
Available at The Last Word