COURTESY: AMAZON.COM
Rachel Cusk’s most recent novel, “Outline,” is almost entirely composed of 10 conversations that the novel’s narrator has with other characters. When I heard this summary, I immediately thought it sounded gimmicky. I expected the novel’s experiment with structure and form to be overwrought and ineffective. I was wrong.
The narrator of the novel is almost completely silent, preferring to listen to the stories of the people she encounters over her brief span as a visiting writing instructor in Athens. Without realizing it, the reader learns remarkably little about the narrator. She is a writer, divorced, has more than one child — and that is about all the concrete information the reader can glean. Near the end of the book, her name is finally revealed, and I was almost embarrassed to realize I had not known it the entire time.
The narrator is radically passive and, instead of learning directly about the narrator, the reader discovers her character through her incisive analysis of her interactions or conversations. The people with whom she comes into contact seem to open up to her easily, presenting rose-colored autobiographical tales of their lives. For the majority of their time, they talk and she listens. These characters are presented vividly, in stark contrast to the narrator — who is quick to see through the good light in which most people bask themselves. She is alert to the irony present in current ways of life and deftly identifies hidden meanings within the others’ stories.
Starting with the billionaire with whom she lunches before flying to Athens and continuing to the man she sits next to on the plane, these conversations unfold one after another. Each person she listens to in some way touches on a subject that affects our narrator. An editor and old friend describes to her the first awkward vacation he took with his children after his divorce; the man she meets on the plane basically attacks his second wife and her actions as their marriage broke down.
By stringing together our narrator’s thoughts and dissections, the reader forms a prismatic view of her life and views on love, marriage and divorce. So much of who she is as a person is revealed through how she views others. By exploring how we tell stories about ourselves and how others receive our stories, the novel also provides an interesting investigation into self-definition and meaning.
The novel lacks a traditional, uniting narrative, though it does unfold chronologically. Cusk eschews many other conventions, such as first-hand dialogue (all the conversations are being retold by the narrator) and character development, as even the central character is resolutely unchanged at the novel’s end. Almost an anti-hero, our narrator doesn’t want to transform anything or anyone — she just wants to observe.
The breathtaking intelligence and originality of this novel make it one you shouldn’t miss. The questions it explores about the importance of our identity and our observations are crucial; the conclusions Cusk reaches are innovative and illuminating. “Outline” will make you wonder what you have been missing hidden underneath all of your own conversations.
