On ‘Outline’ by Rachel Cusk

There was significant critical momentum driving the conversation about acclaimed novelist Rachel Cusk’s storytelling in 2018. Attention was given to a debatably autobiographical trilogy, or they are at least a kind of exploration over the past half decade of fiction and nonfiction, in which the first book is Outline (2014), the second of the three volumes is Transit (2017), and the third is this year’s Kudos. 

Outline opens as follows:

Before the flight I was invited for lunch at a London club with a billionaire I’d been promised had liberal credentials. He talked in his open-necked shirt about the new software he was developing, that could help organisations identify the employees most likely to rob and betray them in the future. We were meant to be discussing a literary magazine he was thinking of starting up: unfortunately I had to leave before we arrived at that subject. He insisted on paying for a taxi to the airport, which was useful since I was late and had a heavy suitcase.

One suspects the suitcase won’t get much lighter, and it does not. 

Outline exists within not a genre but a category of novels in which the writers’ narrator or main character moves around a setting — a city, a building — striving now and then, achieving here and there, and marked by their propensity for suddenly meditative modes. The mundane is often the point of the portrait. These tales can become snow-globe worlds, narrative places and times to which the reader has a pleasurably restricted access; uncertain plots (and the less the plot imposes upon the imagination, the better) characterized by noisier frequencies, the pathways along which these narratives transmit always constrained by the parameters of controlled points of view. The Apartment by Greg Baxter (2012), his first novel, is another example — he writes a wintery city of half-realized plans in which the main character goes wonderfully nowhere, prose that, in some ways, Cusk’s protagonist echoes. Sharing a kind of fellow ambition with Cusk’s lines, Baxter’s sentences don’t need to carry the suitcase of quotation; it’s not that nobody talks, but voices intertwine with seeings, feelings, learners full of lookings and not findings. At times a passage approaches something like a shade of hazy poetry.

The cold gets right into my lungs and refreshes me. The snow is coming down a little heavier than before. We turn right, into the wind and snow. We’ll get a newspaper and check it for apartments, she says, and make our way into the center. She crosses her arms and I stick my hands in my pockets, and we walk very close together, so close that we bump into each other. I open a hole with my arm and she slots her arm through. If I were looking for an apartment, she says, I would like one with high ceilings and a big bathtub, and large windows facing a park. What about the kitchen? I ask. She contemplates this—again she lifts her head, like a philosopher. I don’t cook well, she says. Do you? I like to cook, I say, and I’d like to have a nice kitchen. I have a small kitchen, she says. I hardly ever eat at home. My kitchen depresses me. I don’t want a kitchen that depresses me, I say. The streets around here are somber and pretty. We begin to encounter other people. The road curves and widens. There are shops and cafés and a bank. And then there is a small intersection, and a bit of traffic. Saskia and I go inside a shop and she buys a newspaper. She tries to open the paper inside the shop, but it’s a small space, tiny, and other people come in, so we have to leave.

Everything in motion. The air alive with flakes, the lungs alive with air, the arms and the hands and the bodies moving toward each other. Inside and outside, visions of the present, imaginings of the future and the past … streets change shape and roads change direction. People and traffic and the cramped rustling of the too-large paper fill in the margins and other spaces. 

In Outline, hardly anything moves, and when it does the action often changes nothing. Even if time is sweeping over it, changing it, leaving behind whole days — and maybe a run of days at once — Cusk’s cityscape is another world, a silent and strange place … more mystery than material.

At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness. At some point darkness fell, but otherwise the evenings were strangely without the sense of progression: it didn’t get cooler, or quieter, or emptier of people; the roar of talk and laughter came unstaunched from the glaring terraces of restaurants, the traffic was a swarming, honking river of lights, small children rode their bicycles along the pavements under the bile-coloured streetlamps. Despite the darkness it was eternal day, the pigeons still scuffling in the neon-lit squares, the kiosks open on street corners, the smell of pastry still hanging in the exhausted air around the bakeries.

The most engaging parts of Outline are when she captures a moment or an insight, waxing philosophical or letting Faye’s, the narrator’s, gaze settle deeply for a time on the face of a man on a plane, or the memory of a child’s delight and anxiety at dropping things from a high chair. Cusk has an astonishing ear for the intimate murmurings of a mind: “He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.” Whether memory, memoir, or fiction, it is a persuasive journey into inner thoughts — not longing but still emotional.

Our narrator’s attention, however, is almost always an arm’s-length affair — she only supposes, she only might commit to action. Nothing is terribly, utterly compelling. The way things work out at a creative writing class she teaches or whether the literature her companion takes the time to describe is important … these things make little difference to the tale … or to its telling. She has no desire to prove opinions, or to disprove them, or to stake claims, really, on any critical position at all. In this way, Outline sometimes dissolves; the demands of Faye’s voice sometimes fade so that her voice is barely there. We are at a symphony but outside, the music coming through a door, and the door is closed, and we must wait for a pause before we can enter. At times, throughout Outline, this is the primary sensation, that you’ve arrived at the concert but a bit too late. You might not get in, and this is the way you’ll have to listen.