Outline

a book about writing about writing

I only found out that this novel was polarising shortly after I began, and then around Chapter 2 or 3 I began to understand why. Rachel Cusk’s Outline is Book 1 of her Outline trilogy. It tells the story of a female writer, recently divorced, on a trip to Athens from where she is to stay in a beautiful apartment and teach in a writing workshop. During this trip, alongside teaching her class, she meets several acquaintances—mostly other writers and poets—and develops a relationship with a Greek thrice-divorcee who happened to sit next to her on the plane from London, never named, always addressed as ‘her neighbour.’ 

The polarisation stems from the novel’s atypical structure and prose style; the story is told in first-person past tense but almost none of the narrator’s internal emotional state is ever conveyed. The novel also does not follow a conventional ‘beginning-middle-end’ structure. Instead, what you are given is a novel largely made of individual instances of long direct and indirect dialogues in which the narrator’s several interlocutors describe their life stories, often centred around the process of becoming middle-aged and divorced and undergoing several crises of identity—and in their telling of their stories you are given just the slightest amount of detail about the narrator herself, as it is implied in this intentional selection of stories there is something of the narrator reflected in kinship.

My main issue with this novel is that through this process of intentional selection there’s a large degree of artifice in the novel which, although I often turn a blind-eye to the vapid term ‘unrealistic’, definitely detracted from my enjoyment. I don’t mind if dialogue in a story is unrealistic (in my opinion fiction shouldn’t aim to be realistic) but in a story centred around different characters' long soliloquy-like dialogues, the resulting ‘sameness’ of the opposing voice displayed a real disinterest in actually delving into ‘people’ which, due to the infinite complexities of people and experiences, is what I look to from fiction. Instead, Outline is ironically self-centred, with the only person being actually explored is the narrator, which may be, for all intents and purposes, Cusk herself.

What you end up with, for better or for worse, is Cusk talking to a variety of people who, despite the mixes of genders and ages, represent really just different aspects of herself. It is not a coincidence that every character seemingly relates a tale of white middle-class banality, with diplomat husbands, artist wives, affairs, yachts, parties, readings, wine, and a navel-gazy introspection towards life.

Despite all of this, this ‘13-person person’ to whom the narrator dialogues with never ceased to enrapture me. This is because on the sentence and paragraph level Cusk is a very good writer. The way characters talk is given the same punchiness and composition of philosophical dialogues and, despite it feeling like the same moral was delivered over and over again, the story to which the moral attached was varied enough to keep me happily reading. Characters told genuinely interesting stories filled with evocative imagery, beautiful metaphors, and a serious sense of pathos. 

There are also little pockets of humour scattered throughout, a kind of dry, sneering, mocking humour, that was expertly executed. To me these separate characters telling their stories therefore felt less like a continuation of one novel and more like a collection of short stories, the conversationalist just its narrative frame, all linked around the author’s thematic fixation of divorce, midlife crises, and picking up one’s life when it is dashed to pieces.

Furthermore, there are also points in the novel where a character breaks free from its monolithic mould and presents a narrative so un-narrator-like (to me, the airplane neighbour in the second half of the novel and the ‘dog-story woman’ represent this) that was so entrancing that it made me kind of sad, in that it only made me think of how good the novel could be if this was the norm of the narrator’s conversations.

It is because of my almost singular obsession with prose-over-everything in regarding a work that my takeaway from the novel is mostly positive. This is a trilogy, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the trilogy is simply more stories told by more characters and keeps the same plotless-ness of Outline 1, so I’ll definitely give these a shot too, but it is not the highest on my list for now.

Brainy, thinly, floaty… conversations as negations of self. Negation of self as growing older.

Es war mein erstes Buch von Cusk, und ich war sehr gespannt. In Outline geht es um die Protagonistin Faye, die nach Athen reist, um einen Schreibkurs zu unterrichten. Wir erfahren nicht viel über sie, aber umso mehr über die Menschen, die sie trifft. Im Buch werden viele Lebensgeschichten der Figuren geschildert – ihre Gedanken, Ängste, Träume. Es sind viele interessante Geschichten dabei, doch was verborgen bleibt, ist die Geschichte der Protagonistin selbst.

Ich mochte das Setting – das heiße Athen im Sommer, das Meer – und die Dialoge haben mich mitgerissen. Das Buch scheint einen feministischen Unterton zu haben, und in den Gesprächen geht es viel um Ehe, Beziehungen, Scheidung, Kinder, Familie und das Frausein. Was ich allerdings bemängle, sind die Erzählstimmen der einzelnen Figuren, die relativ gleich wirkten und keinen persönlichen Touch hatten. Die Figuren unterscheiden sich zwar in ihrer Lebensgeschichte und ihrem Aussehen, aber nicht in ihrer Sprache find ich. Es fehlte ihnen an Individualität, was ich sehr schade fand.

Understated with deep introspection story loosely following a English writer in Greece through a series of cerebral conversations with friend, strangers and students. Beginning with a chat on flight from London to Athens, we follow the narrator as she moves from one discussion to the next as she draws out intimate details from her companions throughout her summer teaching a writing class. Throughout these conversations, infidelity, family, failure, solitude, success, violence and nihilism are all explore through clever and clear prose. It's a hard tale to capture and the plot is banal, but the writing and psychoanalysis are incredibly well executed in a very manageable 250 pages.

Best dialogue I’ve read

i hated reading it in the beginning. it was infuriating and the characters felt vague. but later on, as i processed, something clicked inside me and i found myself wanting to know more about how their brain chemistry worked.

it was extremely dry. the narrator took every actions so passively, she didn't contribute to the story line at all which in turn, made the entire story passive and i am absolutely all for active characters.

the book reflects on how different encounters with people shape a person's lives. the idea that we are all actually just outlines, it was infuriating and yet i cannot stop myself from pondering over it every now and then.

the truth is that this book can't be summarised. i just can't. the pace was annoyingly slow in the first chapter, i had considered dnf-ing more than five times but i am glad i pushed through because there are so many things that i did learn from this book. human complexities are nuanced and maybe, we, indeed, are just outlines.

I like meta- writers reflecting on writing etc. Relaxed bood which I enjoyed but not particularly stayed with me

odd but appealing in some parts.

pretentious (said affectionately)

The book that made you both in awe and lost in time with the writing style and the series of interactions over different circumstances and yes i have repeated most of the beautiful sentences she's written bazillion times; out loud. Tbh, i rarely felt compelled to keep reading. It's a brilliant, tremendous, exquisite book, but intentionally has no grip. This made me fascinated by it, but it also slowed me down. But eventually I finished, in awe, in love, infatuated, and it makes me wanna write and travel.

observations what plot writing is one of the best i’ve read yet, ideas are beautifully represented. i highly recommend taking the time to comprehend each word in this book

I was hooked in the beginning, got lost in the middle, for some reason kept reading, and inhaled the end. Lovely writing, but it just felt like 5 long conversations in which the narrator barely participates. That must be the point? That people will take up all the space around you if you let them?

Still not really sure what I thought about this. Loved the format: an (autobiographical?!) story told through conversations with strangers (or monologues they have at her) on a trip to Athens. Some I found very moving though I wasn’t rushing to finish the book and over all it left me a bit…empty. Maybe because her story is told in relief so it’s hard to build a connection with her?? Something about it felt special though! I’ll try another.

wanted 2 like! but had to grit my teeth thru most of it, writing felt a little too in love w itself

This book had beautiful sentences but I found it incredibly dull. I also found much of the dialog pretentious and striving for such depth that it wasn't recognizable as anything real humans say in their every day conversations.

I couldn’t put this book down and still can’t put my finger on why. It didn’t have a fast-moving plot line or even very deep character development. It was simply a collection of personal, mostly one-sided conversations about everything and nothing with ordinary people set in a languid, hot Greece, mediated by the passive protagonist. Rachel Cusk is stupidly talented and I can’t wait to read more of her work. Delightful.

literally no one talks like the people in here talk but it's fine, i still enjoyed it and yearned for conversations like the ones in the book even though i knew they were all ... written

Really good, although I think I would’ve gotten more out of it if I’d read it physically

This is a book that I feel like in reading it by myself, on my own, without discussion, I missed out. I wish I had read this in English class. It’s so full. This is an experimental book without plot. We don’t know much about the narrator, besides that she’s a writer from England teaching a summer course in Athens. We eventually learn her name (Faye), that she has two sons, and that she is no longer married. It’s a book in conversations. The narrator talks to colleagues, students, friends, and an older Greek man she sits next to on her flight, and then meets again to go swimming. The conversations say so much about marriage and divorce, motherhood, and identity, and the ideas are often provocative and even radical, but they are said with such frank directness, it was almost uncomfortable at times to read. I found myself having to pause frequently to consider the words more carefully. I thought it was especially interesting when we’d get someone’s story, and then the narrator would push back against the one-sidedness of their perspective, or would openly disagree with their take. It feels like there is so much packed into this book. It’s hard to say if I enjoyed it - this book defies a typical star rating system. It’s unlike books I typically reach for, as reading it demanded my full attention and effort. I am looking forward to picking up the remaining two books in this trilogy.

a bit disappointed with this one - it was pretty good and very well written in many parts but i don't think i was really that drawn into the world that she created. some chapters i kind of had to slog through. feels as though everyone else who's copied this style of narrative was able to expand on it in a more meaningful way

last book of 2019... and it simply was not for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What is plot? Why is plot?