This by Rachel Cusk. It was published in 2014, and it's the first of a trilogy. I listened to the audio-version, which was very engagingly narrated by Kristin Scott Thomas.

And why? Well, Cusk is a name I kept hearing. Petya Grady, one of my favourite bookish Substackers, says of the trilogy as a whole that it "completely changed my reading trajectory". In a Where To Start With Rachel Cusk article, this is the first one mentioned. It's described as "groundbreaking", "revelatory", and "a masterpiece".

I'd bagged an Audible copy a while ago, but the push to actually listen came from Gwendoline Riley. Asked about the book that changed the way she thought about the novel, she commented: "Novels, for me, are looking to get closer to the truth by showing the truth. I can't fail to mention Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy here. That knocked some barnacles off."

And you can see the similarities between Cusk and Riley. Rather than being driven by a strong, overarching storyline, both these books remind me of the way you set out a game of patience. You lay the cards -- literally put all your cards on the table -- and then you adjust them a bit, and then some kind of pattern emerges, and an impression is made.

It's very, very clever.


Brilliant cover. It looks like a listening ear, but of course, if you put it to your own ear, you hear your inner self

***

Our narrator is a novelist, Faye, who is in Athens to teach a writing course. (A slight sticking-point for me was that these Greeks are all expected to do their creative writing in English, and indeed all speak the language impeccably.)

Outline consists of 10 conversations, a mixture of direct and indirect speech. Faye engages with her neighbour on the plane to Athens (God preserve me from such chatty seat-mates...); with her fellow writing teachers; with her friends in Athens, and their friends; with her students as they respond to her various prompts; even with the absent person in whose apartment she's staying (which is "highly orderly" -- "I kept looking for something else, a clue, something rotting or breeding, a layer of mystery or chaos or shame, but I didn't find it"). All these people tell mini-stories. About their lives. Mostly about their relationships. Mostly about how these relationships have gone wrong, and how they've had to learn to adjust to new, apres-relationship lives. They're often too absorbed in their own predicament to interrogate Faye's.

She herself, therefore, says fairly little.

As Grady remarks: "She ... reveals almost nothing about herself, at least not directly, and yet, through that absence, a portrait of a woman and a writer slowly takes shape. It's the writer as observer, the self defined in negative space. The effect is both stunning and slightly disorienting." Is this quality the explanation for the title? Or is the title suggesting that we can only ever get an outline idea of other human beings, because anything more substantive is doomed to be elusive?

What we do learn is that Faye's marriage has ended. It is impossible, she tells the man she meets on the plane, "to give the reasons why the marriage had ended; among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious". Now she is "trying to find a different way of living in the world".

Every now and then, there's a long-distance interruption from one or other of her children, about locating a tennis racket or getting lost on the way to school. She also has money worries.

Generally, she comes across as more than a little adrift. At one point, she says, a propos of a situation others might consider risky: "What other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures."

She fears a loss of objectivity: "I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people's lives a commentary on my own." Which is certainly an interesting reflection on the tenor of the rest of the conversations. She's the narrator, after all. We hear everyone else through her ears.


Athens, 2019

***

Outline, we're told, marked a shift in style from Cusk's previous novels. After two quite controversial memoirs, she decided to move away from conventional realism and towards fictionalized autobiography. In interviews, she attributes the form and content of Outline to the "psychological rupture" that followed her own divorce. The apparent irretrievability of her former self and her inability to continue to believe in conventional marriage are both qualities that are very evident in Faye and some of her interlocutors. This experience also fatally undermined her faith in the traditional novel.

There is, as I said, no "plot" to Outline. And yet the whole thing is mesmerizing. I just followed along, snippet by snippet, listening to people relating their lives.

The first person she talks to -- this is pre-trip -- is a super-rich man who is thinking of starting a literary magazine: "The billionaire had been keen to give me the outline of his life story..."

And this is the theme. People want to tell her their stories.



Plane Neighbour (who is never named) gets the most air time, and makes repeated appearances. We hear about his family; his three marriages (all ending in divorce); his mentally ill son; his various career moves. After the first instalment, our writing-teacher narrator tells us: "I remained dissatisfied by the story of his second marriage. It had lacked objectivity; it relied too heavily on extremes, and the moral properties it ascribed to those extremes were often incorrect... The narrative invariably showed certain people -- the narrator and his children -- in a good light, while the wife was brought in only when it was required of her to damn herself further... This was a story in which I sensed the truth was being sacrificed to the narrator's desire to win."

And there we have it: We're the sum of the stories we tell about ourselves, with all their biases and uncertainties. Our stories reflect all we can bear about ourselves -- not all we can bare about ourselves. While she's out with Plane Neighbour on his boat, Faye is at one point nearly thrown over the back by a sudden and rapid acceleration: "I wondered what he would have felt if he'd arrived at our destination to discover that I was no longer there; I imagined him explaining this latest piece of carelessness to the next woman he met on an airplane. She kept pestering me to go out on the boat, he would say, but it turned out she didn't know the first thing about sailing. To be perfectly honest, he would say, it was the full disaster: she fell overboard, and now I am very sad."

Faye seems surprised when Plane Neighbour declares his love on another of their boat trips. We're not surprised at all. We've seen Shirley Valentine. She's polite but firm to him. To us, she mercilessly exposes his unattractiveness. You can't help feeling a little bit sorry for him.



How tragic our stories often are. Two Irish brothers (one now Faye's colleague on the writing course) get the opportunity to go to America, and return as "members of two different social classes": "While Ryan went off to Dublin to take up a university teaching post, Kevin returned to the damp bedroom of their childhood, where excepting the odd stay in mental institutions, he has remained ever since."

Pervading the book is a definite air of melancholy. Together, the stories-within-stories reflect how hard it is to be a human, how impossible it is to do anything other than grope your way blindly along, always clueless as to what's around the next corner. Plane Neighbour quotes his mother's words of wisdom: "Family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn't divorce it would be something else, she said. There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain... Everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful."

Others look back from the hard present with rose-tinged nostalgia. Paniotis, for example, a friend of Faye's, and another disappointed man, is currently writing about his childhood, and how happy he was: "The world that happiness existed in has completely disappeared, not just in my own life but in Greece as a whole, for whether it knows it or not Greece is a country that is on its knees and dying a slow and agonising death."

The recurring themes in Outline are loneliness, disappointment, things not turning out as you expected, things happening that you didn't anticipate or bargain for...

And yet we survive...



***

There's a particularly feminine slant to some of the disappointment. Paniotis introduces Faye to Angeliki, another writer. Her novel features "a woman painter whose artistic life is gradually being stifled by her domestic arrangements". And this is obviously a reflection of Angeliki's own experience. When you have a baby, she says, you feel supremely important and needed -- "except that one day you realise that all this -- the house, the husband, the child -- isn't importance after all, in fact it is the exact opposite: you have become a slave, obliterated!"

One of the writing students, Penelope, concurs: "Generally speaking it was not possible, she had accepted after yesterday's class, for a person in her position to be a writer, someone whose time was not their own. And so she had spent the evening in the way she usually did, cooking dinner for her children and ministering to their ceaseless demands." (But her story of Mimi, the family dog she grows to hate, is one of the most memorably powerful segments in the book.)

So many obstacles. And yet we survive...

And our memories survive, randomly almost. This is another of the points the book makes: Because our lives have no meaningful story arc, there's no telling which of our memories ends up being indelible. Paniotis, for example, relates how -- after a terrible excursion with his children, in which everything goes wrong -- they all end up swimming in a pool beneath a waterfall: "'How cold the water was, and how incredibly deep and refreshing and clear -- we drifted around and around, with the sun on our faces and our bodies hanging like three white roots beneath the water. I can see us there still,' he said, 'for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them,' he said, 'despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing in our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were. Once Chrysta and I divorced, things did not join up in that way any more, although I tried for years to make it seem as though they did. But there was no sequel to that time in the pool, nor ever will be.'"

The search for "story" -- for telic meaning -- can be pernicious. Elena, another friend of Faye's, confesses: "Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span."



***

I've probably quoted enough to make clear that this is a very thought-provoking book.

As humans we are fascinated by other people's lives, whether or not most of them have much of a coherent arc or meaning or message. I happened to be listening to Outline just as ITV was broadcasting 70 Up, the final instalment of a documentary that has followed a group of people in seven-year intervals from the age of seven. These have always been moving television experiences, even though the first director does seem, in retrospect, a little too inclined to create arcs, meanings, and messages out of what his subjects tell him (the current iteration reveals the frustration felt by some of them over that approach).

Ed Power puts his finger on what reels us in: "Their stories are by turns riveting and devastating, but it is also the case that in their experiences -- those random moments of happiness and disappointment -- we can catch reflections of our own lives. They made their plans, the universe got in the way -- and all they could do was carry on with as much courage and dignity as they could muster... Life happens, you get on with it, and then, suddenly, there you are, aged 70, full of regrets -- but somehow compelled to keep going. It's a journey we're all on, and the morbidly comforting message of 70 Up is that nobody has things figured out and that all we really can do is muddle through as best we can."

Something similar emerges from Outline.



***

This is a darker book than The Palm House. Kate Kellaway writes, "This is no wry comedy of conversations but a cool-headed meditation on the doomed nature of relationships." You can't even own a dog without getting involved in a power struggle...

At one point, Faye offers us conclusions that we might call her life wisdom, the code she had learnt to submit to:

"I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying -- it seemed to me -- was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become -- to put it bluntly -- anathema to me. There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all."

Wisely undemanding, or needlessly passive? I don't know... Again coincidentally, just as I was thinking about this, a friend pointed me to Steve Taylor's Time To Stop Striving. Part of it goes like this:

It's time to give up
the endless struggle to become
and accept that this is all there is,
that there's nothing more to gain or lose
that if this moment isn't good enough
then no moment ever will be
that if you can't make peace with this moment now
then you'll always be at war.

Lots of food for thought. I'll definitely return to this trilogy.