It gradually becomes clear that the source of Faye’s diffidence is a recent, and possibly unexpected, divorce: over lunch, her friend Paniotis remembers how, on a London visit three years previously, her happiness with her husband and two kids had left him feeling despondent and dissatisfied with his own life.įaye’s thoughts and utterances suggest someone benumbed, hollowed out: “I found appearances more bewildering and tormenting now than at any previous point in my life. (Cusk has been more voluble about her own life: her eleven books include three memoirs, one of which created a kerfuffle overseas for its unromantic views about motherhood.) In fact, despite narrating in the first person, she reveals virtually nothing about herself. The dust jacket calls Outline “a novel in ten conversations,” but that feels slightly inaccurate given that Kaye often acts more like a confessor than a participant. The novel is structured around a series of encounters between a rotating cast of characters - a ruined shipping fortune scion, a flamboyant novelist, a preeminent lesbian poet - and Faye, our writer-protagonist. In Outline - whose economy and intensity often makes it feel like a short story that just happens to be long - Cusk uses unostentatious but immaculately chosen language to convey graspable ideas about marriage, divorce and personal identity that have no less an impact for being so. The bromide could be applied to Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Outline, about a UK writer who comes to Athens to teach a summer writing course Cusk’s placid, measured prose certainly seems at odds with the sense of exhilaration we get reading it.īut are compelling ideas necessarily complex ones? Is a writing style ever a form of trickery? Personally, I find the opposite to be true: fussy, word-laden sentences can divert attention from a lack of substance (to wit, no one says “deceptively elaborate”).

It’s become a book review cliché to describe plain but effective prose as “deceptively spare,” the implication being that some form of legerdemain has been used to conjure deep thoughts from simple words.

Outline rachel cusk review