'Outline' by Rachel Cusk is a disappointing read

Outline

By Rachel Cusk

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

256 pp. $26

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Reviewed by

Katie Haegele

Rachel Cusk is an award-winning author of seven novels and three memoirs.  This new novel, Outline, with its dislocated emotional content and characters that are little more than biographies, seemed disappointingly cold at first, and odd.

Outline opens when its narrator, an English writer whose name we don't learn until the book is nearly at its end, is in a meeting with a "billionaire," thinking of starting a literary magazine. Swiftly, the narrator makes her way from lunch to a flight to Athens, where she will rent a flat and teach a writing course.

We don't learn much about this narrator for a while - indeed, ever - except that her marriage has ended, though not very recently. Instead, we meet each person she meets - first a rich man, then her seatmate on the airplane, then a parade of people in Greece - each plunging immediately and deeply into a perplexing amount of detail about their personal histories. She occasionally responds, but her comments are never quoted directly. We're left with the impression of a silent listener, someone about whom we know (and care) almost nothing.

We eventually get an inkling of her circumstances - her name, by the way, is Faye - which serve as a kind of explanation for her eerie vagueness. She's suffered some loss, and life as she has known it has been altered beyond recognition. At a moment brought on by sudden anger and fear, the narrator gushes out something of her own personal history, and realizes that ". . . what other people thought was no longer of any help to me."

Yet the stories of others go past, suggesting that while none is of much importance, they somehow keep the world turning. They represent the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we create to help us live, as well as those that are larger than ourselves, that constantly create us. The writing teacher doesn't write anything in Greece, and she never talks about writing, even to her students. The whole thing is like a meditation on writer's block, only not for writers. Thinker's Block. Being Block.

As intelligent and illuminating as it may be, reading this book isn't much fun. A good novel tends to beckon you back after you've set it down, but in Outline Cusk has given us little to miss or wonder about when the book is shut. We're left with a feeling of essential meaninglessness, which may be the point she was making all along.

Katie Haegele's latest book is "Slip of the Tongue." Her e-mail is katie@thelalatheory.com.