The narrator, bitter herself, extols the virtues of passivity as a philosophy of life. Cusk, it becomes clear, had had enough of illusion. Its principal agents, sexual attraction and parenthood, are both mercilessly called to account. If Cusk has an agenda, a unifying theme to these conversations it is the shredding of romantic illusion. Each chapter either recounts a conversation with someone she meets or a group discussion with her writing class. They become like a Greek chorus of voices without a play.Ī writer, unnamed until the penultimate chapter, travels to Athens to host a writing workshop. She makes no other dramatic demands of them. Cusk interviews her potential characters and lets them tell her emotionally pivotal stories about themselves.
In other words it is indeed an outline, an outline for a work that it still shadowy in the writer’s mind. Reading Outline is like spying on an author in the process of auditioning characters for a future novel. Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives.īeginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course.
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