I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. The man she meets on the plane goes so far as to tell her that “a life with no story was not, in the end, a life that I could live”.īut one also has to wonder if Cusk isn’t actually playing a joke on her reader, for in using a narrator who is deliberately passive, you realise that she’s subverted the normal mechanics of the novel and you’re left to take the writing completely on its own terms. Perhaps the most interesting element is the way in which Cusk litters these stories with references to the art of writing, so that, for instance, mixed messages between people are seen “as a cruel plot device that did sometimes have their counterpart in life” and that the love between a man and a woman “is what you perhaps would call the storyline”.

Perhaps it’s enough to recall that they were often about big life events, such as marriage, having a family and building a career. There are her students, some more extroverted than others, who tell her stories based on her prompts. There are her friends, whom she’s met on previous trips. And finally there is the new teacher, who will take over her position when she leaves.Īll these varied characters tell our narrator stories about themselves - some more memorable than others, it has to be said - which gives Outline the feel of a short story collection rather than as one, cohesive novel.Īdmittedly, I found myself drawn into these individual tales even though I can’t recall the details of them just a week or two after having read the book. There is the Irishman, who is also in Greece to teach creative writing. There’s the man she meets on the aeroplane, who later takes her on a boat trip, and whom she refers to throughout as “my neighbour”. “A story might merely be a series of events we believe ourselves to be involved in, but on which we have absolutely no influence at all.” So says one of the characters in Rachel Cusk’s Outline. I quote it here because it’s an almost perfect description of this novel, which revolves around a passive narrator who listens to an endless string of tales told to her by various people over the course of a working trip to Greece. Fiction – Kindle edition Vintage 256 pages 2015.

Outline by rachel cusk