“There was a difference,” she says, “between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.” You like this woman, in part, because you are not sure if you like her at all.Ī modest amount of literary talk occurs in “Outline,” though even that tends to swing back around to romantic failure. Sometimes that place sounds impossible to locate or, almost the same thing, locatable anywhere. The narrator in “Outline” is on the run from one kind of life and searching for where next to pitch her emotional, mental, moral tent. About worthwhile people, she quotes one of her friends: “The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.” You sense she has found the right people to listen to.
The most resonant verb in her novel is “ask.”Ĭredit. “Outline” is 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. It’s a deliberate shedding of skin from a writer who not long ago announced in The Guardian her newfound conviction that conventional fiction is “fake and embarrassing.” That’s an easy thing for a novelist to say, a far harder thing to persuasively follow through on in her work.įollow through she does. Her previous novels have been adept but traditional in form.
Cusk’s thin volume, though with only modest expectations. Auden’s comment, “Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation,” I picked up Ms. Reeling from holiday food and conviviality, wishing to make the world go away, feeling in my bones W. Such was the case for me with “Outline,” Rachel Cusk’s new novel.
Sometimes a book arrives in your life exactly when you need it.
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