Outline (Cusk)

Outline 
Rachel Cusk, 2014
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374228347


Summary
A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language.

A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking—about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.

Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane.

The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.

Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people’s motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing.

This is Rachel Cusk’s finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Where—Canada
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Whitbread Award; Somerset Maughm Award
• Currently—lives in London


Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles before finishing her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. She read English at New College, Oxford, and has travelled extensively in Spain and Central America.

She is the author of eight novels, the first of which, Saving Agnes (1993), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her 2001 nonfiction exploration of motherhood, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, generated considerable controversy. Some women accused Cusk of loathing her own children while others secretly felt the book mirrored their own troubled attitudes. Inspite of—or because of—the controversy, the book has been reprinted numerous times, with Lynn Barber of the UK's The Guardian regarding it as "probably the most powerful book on motherhood ever written."

Her third novel, The Country Life (1997) won the Somerset Maughm Novel Award, while two other novels (see below) were shortlisted for literary prizes. In 2003, Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 Best of Young British Novelists.

Cusk is divorced from her second husband, photographer Adrian Clarke, with whom she has two daughters, Albertine and Jessye. Cusk wrote in detail about the marriage in Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012); a review of the book by Camilla Long won Long the "Hatchet Job of the Year" award.

Books
1993 - Saving Agnes (Whitbread First Novel Award)
1995 -The Temporary
1997- The Country Life (Somerset Maughm Novel Award)
2001 - A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother
2003 - The Lucky Ones (shortlisted, Whitbread Award)
2005 - In the Fold
2006 - Arlington Park (shortlisted, Orange Prize)
2009 - The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy
2009 - The Bradshaw Variations
2012 - Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
2014 - Outline
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/15/2015.)

Book Reviews
[L]ethally intelligent…. While the narrator is rarely alone, reading Outline mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk's literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this novel and you'll become convinced she is one of the smartest writers alive. Her narrator's mental clarity can seem so hazardously penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure. Cusk is also—this sounds ridiculous—but she is also noticeably an adult. She writes about adult topics with sagacity and authority. Well-worn subjects—adultery, divorce, ennui—become freshly menacing under her gaze.
Heidi Julavits - New York Times Book Review


[A] poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way of straightforward plot yet is transfixing in its unruffled awareness of the ways we love and leave each other, and of what it means to listen to other people…. While little happens in Outline, everything seems to happen. You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit. This is largely because the small conversations and monologues in Outline are, at their best, as condensed and vivid as theater…. Ms. Cusk marshals a lot of gifts in this novel, and they are unconventional ones. With no straightforward narrative to hang onto, no moving in and out of rooms, she's left with the sound of her own mind, and it's a mind that is subtle, precise, melancholy. This is a novel with no wasted motion…Outline is a palate cleanser, an authoritative bit of clarifying acid, here when needed.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


Described as a "novel in ten conversations"...it turns out to be a　clever, fresh device that dispenses with the need for much of a plot and presents instead more of a lush human collage.... [A] rich, thoughtful read.
Carol Midgley - (London) Times


Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on to the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller.... [A] stellar accomplishment.
James Lasdun - Guardian (UK)


Outline. It defies ordinary categorisation. It is about authorial invisibility, it involves writing without showing your face. The narrator is a writer who goes to teach creative writing in Greece and becomes enmeshed in other peoples’ narratives which Cusk stitches, with fastidious brilliance, into a single fabric.
Kate Kellaway - Guardian (UK)


[T]his has to be one of the oddest, most breathtakingly original and unsettling novels I’ve read in a long time ... [E]very single word is earned, precisely tuned, enthralling. Outline is a triumph of attitude and daring, a masterclass in tone.
Julie Myerson - Observer (UK)


[A work] of great beauty and ambition. Narratives are smoothed, as if by translation and retranslation, into their simplest, barest elements: parents, children, divorces, cakes, dresses, dogs. These elements then build, layer on layer, to form the most complex and exquisitely detailed patterns, swirling and whirling, wheels within wheels.
Jenny Turner - London Review of Books


[A] uniquely graceful and innovative piece of artistic self-possession, which achieves the rare feat of seamlessly amalgamating form and substance.
Lucy Scholes - Independent (UK)


Cusk’s uncompromising, often brutal intelligence is at full power. So is her technique... I can’t think of a book that so powerfully resists summary or review.... Inevitably, the only way to get close to the fascinating and elusive core of Outline is to read it.
Sophie Elmhirst - Financial Times


Never less than compelling...material that might have been ponderous in other hands is, here, magnetic, thanks to the mystery at the heart of Cusk’s book, her exquisite lightness of touch and her glinting wit.
Stephanie Cross - Daily Mail (UK)


The writing is brilliant.... Cusk is always cerebral but I've never noticed her drollery before...absorbing, thought-provoking.
Claire Harman - London Evening Standard (UK)


Cusk confounds expectations.... Outline is full of such wonderful surprises: subtle shifts in power and unexpectedly witty interludes.
Elena Seymenliyska - Telegraph (UK)


A tapestry of different voices, its shape emerging as if by happy accident.... [OutlinOutlinee] is a clever thought experiment that’s far too readable ever to feel like one.
Lidija Haas - Independent on Sunday (UK)


(Starred review.) On an airplane to Athens....Faye strikes up a conversation with the passenger... [and eventually] learns about his multiple marriages and troubled children. Thus begins this brilliant novel from Cusk...structure[d] around a series of dialogues between Faye and those she encounters on her travels.
Publishers Weekly


This book about love, loss, memory, and the lies we tell ourselves and others exudes a contemplative, melancholy atmosphere tempered by Britsh author Cusk’s wonderfully astute observations of people and the visual impressions created by her exquisitely strucutred sentences. —Sally Bissell
Library Journal


[T]he most compelling part of Outline is its undercurrent of rage.... [With] polished, analytical language. Cusk’s writing is lovely.... Outline is a smart ascetic exercise. —Hannah Tennant-Moore
Bookforum


(Starred review.) Outline is an expertly crafted portrait that asks readers to look deeply into the text for discovery. Those who accept that challenge will be rewarded for the effort.
Booklist


The individual stories collectively suggest that self-knowledge is a poor substitute for happiness, but perhaps readers can find some hope from the narrator's admission that she can't shake "this desire to be free…despite having proved that everything about it was illusory." Dark, for sure, but rich in human variety and unsentimental empathy..
Kirkus Reviews

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