Outline by Rachel Cusk review – vignettes from a writing workshop
James Lasdun
Wed 3 Sep 2014 16.00 BST
I
Outward appearances are calmly noted: the grey classroom with its humming computer "projecting a blank blue rectangle on to the wall"; the faces and gestures of the students themselves, one with "a demolished beauty she bore quite regally", one "whose expression I had watched grow sourer and sourer as the hour passed", each of them a study in shyness, charm, naivety, smugness or some other sharply observed quality.
Then, as they tell their anecdotes, the scene probes inward into the emotional realities of the students' lives, while simultaneously pushing further outward into the very different worlds they each inhabit. There's a failed pianist who has heard a snatch of familiar music wafting from a window on her way to class. There's a politically committed young man unexpectedly shamed by the sight of some ruined buildings that had been set on fire in a demonstration he'd proudly taken part in the year before. There's the woman of demolished beauty, who has just discovered that her philandering husband has eliminated everything not white from his office, "including some of the people".
By turns touching, grotesque, funny, mundane, the little vignettes have the very natural-seeming inconsequentiality of life, while at the same time resonating with the wider preoccupations of the book: intimacy and estrangement, entrapment and self-regeneration, the idea of marriage as "a system of belief, a story". They are also (and this dense economy of function is a part of Cusk's skill) the chief means by which we come to know the narrator herself, whose acts of close attention to each story and its teller cumulatively suggest the "outline" (as the book's title has it) of her own story, and supply almost all we get by way of information about her own circumstances.
Almost, but not all. Halfway through the class, her phone rings. It's her young son, calling from London, where he is walking to school: "'I'm lost,' he said. 'I don't know where I am.'"
It's an amazing moment, sending a jolt of dramatic urgency through the scene, and confronting the narrator with the hazards involved in her quest for what emerges, tentatively and obliquely, as "a different way of living in the world"; outside the old structures of marriage and family.
The long scene, with its sketches and sharp surprises, its vivid portraiture and covert self-disclosure, along with the running conversation among the students about what makes a story a story, amounts to a kind of impromptu symposium on the relationship between the lives we live and the necessary fictions by which we live them; principally the fiction of love. And in essence that describes the project of Outline as a whole. There's no great plot or overarching conflict, no exotic material, no satirical contrivance; not even (and this seems new for Cusk) any overt social or political axe to grind. In parallel with her narrator's rejection of certain social conventions, Cusk seems to be rejecting the conventions of a certain kind of fiction. Her narrative consists almost entirely of encounters with people whom Faye, the writer, meets: on the plane, in the classroom and at various cafes and restaurants in Athens. There are other writers teaching at the school: a depressed Greek publisher, a popular feminist author who seems initially brought on for purposes of slightly cruel comedy but who evolves, as her monologue takes ever stranger twists and turns, into a complex and subtly sympathetic individual. Counterbalancing these literary types is an ageing, not-quite-successful Greek businessman, who takes Faye out on his boat and provides the book with its funny, painful and idiosyncratic love interest.
Everything is staked on these encounters, which is to say, on Faye's powers of observation and understanding, and her ability to invest the ordinary flux of life with meaning. In this respect, Outline belongs to a strain of literature that runs from the Romantics, through Virginia Woolf, to the memoiristic novels of contemporaries such as Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard. It's the hardest kind of fiction to bring off, always running the risk of narcissism and banality, but when it works, it feels paradoxically more miraculous than its artifice-dependent cousins. To my mind Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on to the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller.
At the end of the workshop scene, the student whose expression was growing "sourer and sourer" explodes in rage at Faye's approach to writing: "something that as far as she was aware involved using your imagination". The idea that "imagination" has to mean making stuff up, rather than seeing reality in a fresh way, is pretty primitive, and the book doesn't really need to indemnify itself against that objection. A more challenging case could be made that in funnelling all the characters' stories through Faye's very refined sensibility (there's little direct speech), Cusk gives them all a certain high-polished sameness, at least at the purely verbal level. I can't say that bothered me, but no doubt it will keep some readers from responding to the book as enthusiastically as I did. It didn't make the Man Booker longlist, for instance. But on the other hand it was serialised in its entirety by the Paris Review, a rare distinction, and a richly deserved tribute to what strikes me as a stellar accomplishment.
No comments:
Post a Comment