Outline, by Rachel Cusk (again)

To accommodate me with my other reading obligations, my book club decided to read a book I had already read as our next book. We were scheduled to meet 2 days after my Women In Translation book club, for which I read EEG and I also had In the Night of Time looming over me when we were discussing our selection. But when I finished EEG with a week to spare, I knew I was going to reread Outline. Actually, I knew it when we chose it that I'd reread it. I loved Outline and even when I was reading it I had the sense I wanted to go back to it. I read Transit and Kudos, and the urge to go back only grew as time passed. In October, I talked with someone who was reading Outline for the first time and I couldn't help gushing, even as I felt I had lost some of the sense of awe I had while reading it, and really only remembered fragments -- though only six months had passed. Now, at not quite eleven months since I read it the first time, I've read it again and I'm able to look at it with some remove, almost to look at it as someone else -- someone to whom it was not awe-inspiring -- might see it. I read the mixed to negative reviews on Goodreads. I read this article in The Guardian, in which the author ponders why Rachel Cusk annoys her so much (and goes on to add that "It is only in England she is pilloried. Elsewhere, she is respected – Paris Review is publishing Outline in extracts. And the Poles love her, too."). My feelings about the book are unchanged, but it's been interesting to attempt to understand what people who don't like it are reading in it.

On this second reading (and probably on the first reading too) I recognized that I identify strongly with some of the themes in the book. I think the way they're presented -- as a series of conversations with other people and about other people, there are stories within stories -- particularly drew me in. The narrator has a sequence of interactions, in which she appears nearly completely passive. Yes people tell or confess these intimate parts of their lives, and the meaning or moral is often ambiguous (or absent). 

When I got to page 105, the bottom corner of the page was turned up and I instinctively flattened it out. But then as I turned to the next page, I wondered if I'd creased it myself as a placeholder. This wouldn't be my usual style -- I'm partial to using small scraps of paper to bookmark key passages or the occasional pencilled in brace, but folding a page is very out of character for me. However, I was traveling when I read Outline and maybe pencils and scraps of paper weren't close at hand. I could just imagine myself turning up the page corner at the bottom of the page, where it would be least offensive. In fact that page did contain a line that really resonated with me. The narrator is relating a conversation, and she says, "I replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were from what you had become through the other person." I had read it and been struck by it after flattening the turned up corner, and still didn't make the connection right away. It was only when I got to the next page that I wondered, "Was that a particular something I wanted to note?" I turned the page back and read it once more, and then folded the corner in again to save it, though I still couldn't remember or even quite imagine myself folding up the page corner. This itself started to take on a quality of ambiguity that felt like a perfect reflection of the book. Later, I found a second and then a third turned up page corner, at which point I became sure this had been my own doing.

Cusk comes back to this idea of losing the self in a relationship toward the very end of Outline, the second time through the mouth of another character. The bulk of this book and the conversations and stories within in could be said to be about the changing nature of the self in relation to others. The narrator's last interlocutor is sort of a mirror of the narrator. The book covers the space of a week during which the narrator has come to Athens to teach writing. Just as she is leaving, another English writer, Anne, arrives to take over the apartment where the narrator has stayed and to teach for the following week. They overlap for a few hours in the apartment. Anne relates the recent upheaval that has taken place in her life, which included the dissolution of her marriage, and then she describes a conversation she had with her neighbor on the plane to Athens. This too is part of the mirroring -- the first chapter includes a long conversation the narrator has with her neighbor on her flight to Athens. Anne's neighbor was a polyglot diplomat, whose life and experiences were completely opposite to her own. The more they talked, the more she saw herself in contrast to her neighbor, 

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 as a 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.

This excerpt could serve as a description of Outline and its narrator. We see very little into her life, but through the conversations she has with friends, strangers, and her students over the course of the book, we start to see an outline.