Rachel Cusk, _Outline_

HAVING ONLY READ Transit, the second in the series, I decided to read this before I picked up Kudos. Outline follows the same method as Transit: we have a first-person narrator, a writer named Faye, divorced mother of two boys, but the focus in each chapter is not on Faye but on the person with whom she is in conversation. It may be someone she knew well in the past, it may be a hairdresser, it may be a brand new acquaintance, like the airplane seat mate we meet in the first chapter of Outline, but whatever the case, every chapter becomes a near-monologue featuring Faye's interlocutor. We get a fair number of asides, reflections, and judgments from Faye, but they seem almost incidental, as if she were a peripheral character in her own novel.

In Outline, Faye is briefly (not even a week, I think) in Athens to teach a writing class. We hear from Ryan, an Irish writer who is part of the same program, from several students, and a couple more times from "my neighbor," the Greek seat mate from the plane. We don't actually see the woman whose apartment Faye is using for the week, but the description of her furnishings is so revealing that we feel we have.

As she leaves for the airport, Faye meets the writer who will be staying in the apartment and  teaching in the program for the week ahead, and this unnamed figure gives us what seems to be the key for Cusk's whole trilogy when she describes a conversation she had (coincidentally) with a random airplane seat mate:

He [the seat mate] was describing, she realized, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not; in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself a s shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

In this way, we know both little about Faye--her name, as in Transit, come sup only once,in both books in the second-to-last chapter)--and a great deal, as the novel's many not-Fayes elaborate their tales.

Neither Outline nor Transit is difficult to read--the prose is as limpid and swift as a clear running stream--but the method makes the novels feel like audacious avant-garde experiments. Not just experiments, but successful ones, as we do begin to get to have a clear idea of Faye through what she takes the time to listen to and record. It's as if The Canterbury Tales were to somehow give us a nuanced psychological portrait of Chaucer...which maybe they do, come to think of it. But that seems the only fiction even remotely comparable to what Cusk is doing here.