Stacey May Fowles
I've often viewed Rachel Cusk's work as a convenient litmus test for our major life choices, largely because she doesn't spare the reader the ugliness of her own. Considering having a child? Read 2001's A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother and then look at how you really feel about that particular sacrifice. Is marriage on your horizon? Read 2012's Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation and think hard about how you'd fare on the other side.
Through these memoirs, the Canadian-born and British-based author has established herself as a both lauded and hated confessor of cautionary personal tales. She's best known for dealing in the kind of modern visceral honesty that some find distasteful, her books unveiling taboo domestic subject matter and encountering vicious criticism as a result. In 2009, her memoir The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy was pulped a month after publication, one of its subjects taking legal action after seeing too much of themselves on the page. It seems Cusk has made it her personal project to nail down that elusive ideal of authenticity – much to her own peril. In using her private life as fodder, she's been met with a familiar chorus of, "Why don't you just keep that to yourself?"
Regardless of how readers judge this very public dissection of her life (as well as those of other people), it is impossible to deny that Cusk is a master of sparse, exquisite prose. With her most recent offering she has taken that skill and returned to the less-controversial realm of fiction. Outline – her eighth novel to date – delicately looks at how the individuals we connect with day-to-day come to define us, and how the stories we tell evolve and cumulate into an immovable personal history. Even the title suggests a nod to the notion that we are defined by how we fit into the negative space in other's experiences.
"I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself," says one character, articulating the book's major theme. "I was beginning to see in other people's lives a commentary on my own."
Once again, Cusk is engrossed by the issue of authenticity, as her unnamed protagonist – a novelist – travels from England to Greece to teach a writing course in Athens's sweltering heat. The premise is a bit uninspired – novels about novelists have of course become cliché – and, to be honest, nothing much actually happens. She walks and eats and drinks and swims, someone makes an awkward pass at her, she teaches a few classes, she goes home. Yet the novel is built around an inspiring device: 10 conversations with characters she encounters, each one revealing their own personal histories and giving Cusk ample room to share insights into marriage, infidelity, tragedy, parenthood and love – subjects she's certainly proven adept at exploring. In fact, this (perhaps unimaginative) set-up only emphasizes how the greatest truths are those told in the smallest, seemingly insignificant moments. The blandness also works in the author's favour – it is a blank slate for Cusk to truly show off her keen and often scathing insight into humanity, even if the confessionals are only fictional this time around.
The novelist chats with her seatmate on the plane, with a colleague in Greece, with her students, with friends over a meal. Through these seemingly innocuous conversations, Outline unpacks a variety of complex issues around human intimacy, with a majority of the "action" nothing more than people sitting across a table from one another. It's a book not only about the way we tell our stories, but how what we put into the world is carefully edited and filtered, even when we claim to be confessing. It can even be seen as an astute comment on Cusk's career so far – yes she's been chided for her honesty, but the truth is not only relative, it's constructed.
Unless Cusk knows far more articulate people than I do, the stories these characters relay about their lives all seem a little too articulate and insightful to ring true, but maybe that's besides the point. The novel is clearly an experiment in the development of identity, and more philosophical treatise than traditionally plotted page-turner.
Cusk's catalogue has long been preoccupied with the private spaces in which we relate to each other, and – despite criticism to the contrary – there's something refreshing about the way she relays human anxieties and foibles, without pretense or artifice. She looks at love – romantic and familial – without sentimentality, with a signature numbness to her delivery that paradoxically gives her subject matter more depth. Outline is the fictional culmination of these insights, coupled with an obvious sharpening of Cusk's craft.
With Outline, Cusk readily proves she has mastered that old writing trope that specificity breeds universality, her style moving precisely because it refuses to push a reader in any particular emotional direction. The book successfully conveys all of her admirable honesty in the safe harbour of fiction, and somehow delivers more human truths than most memoirs ever could.