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Outline by Rachel Cusk, review: 'full of wonderful surprises'
Rachel Cusk’s daring use of an almost silent narrator speaks volumes
Rachel Cusk has mined her life so thoroughly in her books that it is tempting to view her new novel as a continuation of that narrative. While her fiction has hardly been without plaudits (the Whitbread first novel award in 1993 for Saving Agnes, the Somerset Maugham award in 1997 for The Country Life, the Orange prize shortlist in 2007 for Arlington Park), it is the non-fiction that has won her notoriety. Once A Life’s Work (2001) exposed her ambivalence as a mother, and Aftermath (2012) detailed the ugly break-up of her second marriage, Cusk’s status as a remorseless critic of modern womanhood was set.
That critique continues in Cusk’s eighth novel, Outline, but it’s delivered in a rather unusual way – via a narrator who hardly ever speaks. This narrator, a writer and divorced mother of two who goes to Athens to teach a writing course, is so self-effacing that her name, Faye (which, incidentally, means “doomed to die”), is discovered only by chance, towards the book’s end. However, rather than dangling the tantalising possibility that the narrator might be the author herself, this evasion has a much deeper significance, and comes to question one of the basic principles of feminism.
The novel’s title comes from a character who uses the word to describe herself: while talking to a man, and in response to his own firm views about himself, “she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank”. The man had told her about all the languages he spoke, and she’d been so fascinated that she’d asked more questions – about his childhood, his parents, his marriage. She herself is still reeling from a mugging in which her attacker tried to strangle her, but this doesn’t come up in their conversation; instead, the man ends up making her feel the “amorphousness – the changing of shapes” in her life as a woman.
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Outline is made up almost entirely of such eloquent and philosophical, if one-sided, conversations. If this novel were a film, it would be French. Someone, not always but usually a man, talks at length about himself while his companion, not always but usually a woman, listens attentively, only occasionally interjecting with a comment that is brief and perceptive. The talker takes that attention in his stride and makes use of its insights, though rarely reciprocates. Instead, he grows more voluble, while the listener quietly processes what is said.
On her flight to Athens, Faye finds herself next to a wealthy old Greek man with a great beak of a nose. He can talk for hours, and listens only after palpably reminding himself to do so. This man invites her to his boat, buys her lunch and, over the course of a few days, tells her ever more about himself, his three failed marriages, his troubled children, and his chequered career. He is pompous, contradictory, vain, where she is quiet, focused, polite – like an amphora, whose slender opening can accommodate a surprising volume. Like the other woman, she is revealed only in outline, in response to what others say. Her physical presence on the page tends towards the one-liner, while those who talk at her can go on for page-long paragraphs.
Then there are the students in the writing course. Faye listens patiently to their outlines – the stories they want to write, and the life narratives they try to form – but here at least she is paid to listen. It is only in conversation with old friends, with Greek editors, publishers and poets in the cafés and restaurants of Kolonaki Square, that Faye herself gets a platform. By then, so commonplace has it become for her remarks to pass without comment, that when one of her friends responds with further questions, it delivers the most amazing jolt.
That amazement is ours alone – Faye herself is beyond caring. Fielding urgent calls about lost skateboards and failed bank loans while trying to work, she wants nothing for herself, and – more to the point – has made peace with that fact. “I had come,” she says, “to believe more and more in the values of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.” Life’s disappointments have made her see it not as a narrative that makes sense, with a beginning, a middle and an end, but simply as a line, a chain of events, made up merely of the things we happen to notice.
This question – who notices, and who gets noticed; who listens, and who gets listened to – is impossible to ignore, like a finger coming out of the book to jab us in the chest. Yet Faye herself is never angry, never shrill: Cusk confounds expectations by letting her heroine find power in invisibility. By rising quietly like a spirit from the chalk outline of her former self, she is no longer part of anyone’s narrative. She can finally become unchained from whatever might once have defined her.
Outline is full of such wonderful surprises: subtle shifts in power and unexpectedly witty interludes. There is a chapter in which Faye asks her students to come up with a story featuring an animal. A student called Penelope, who has described her life as a ceaseless round of ministering to her husband and children, recounts the story of Mimi, the dog her children begged for but which she – of course! – ends up looking after. As Mimi goes from a cute puppy to an unruly, gluttonous hound, the children get bored of it and Penelope grows resentful.
Mimi becomes the symbol of Penelope’s loss of freedom. She starts to hate Mimi, and begins to hit her, to which Mimi responds with increased unruliness. This toxic relationship culminates in a brilliant – and brilliantly described – scene involving a distracted Penelope, an elaborate birthday cake and a triumphant Mimi. But the only response Penelope gets when her story ends is from Theo, a fellow writing student, who says that “the problem was that she had chosen the wrong dog; he himself had a pug, and never experienced any difficulties”.
Those who still believe in narratives could read this novel as the latest instalment of Cusk’s own life story, the next chapter after A Life’s Work and Aftermath. The conversations in Outline circle around those same themes – of women and men, love and marriage, children and work, success and failure. Yet in the midst of the chatter of those binary opposites thrums the white noise of Faye, her assertive blankness a kind of ground zero for power politics. There is another way, Cusk seems to say – not behind enemy lines, but outside them.
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