More than any other book you’ve read, Outline rides on monologues: This novel is essentially a series of one-sided conversations between the main character and a series of friends and acquaintances she encounters during a week-long stay in Athens, Greece. If I were to guess, I’d say the main character utters five pages of reported dialogue, tops. Her interlocutors carry each exchange. What’s more, our main character takes part in only one scene of actual action, the swimming scene, which extends over a few pages.
The conversations are compelling, revealing, sometimes strange, and always insightful. If you appreciate contemplative or experimental books, you won’t be disappointed. Cusk’s prose is painstaking, lovely, grounded even as it soars. I particularly enjoyed the in-class scene (in which main character is instructing a writing class), where students reel off observations, both trite and profoundly personal. The end of this chapter cuts deep, perhaps because we identify so strongly with our silent main character, and because the last student’s parting insult negates the structure of the entire novel: According to this student, simply talking isn’t any part of writing. Yet here we are, reading a great novel that’s almost entirely talking. I’d defend it to the pain, at least.
The experimental here? For me, it’s how Cusk constructs a main character worth following, given this framework. Cusk vivifies this character (whose name we don’t even know until page 211 of 249) with “main-character energy” from the get-go. In the first scene, we hear her state some strong opinions and claim the top spot in the novel. This is almost singular; rarely does she come to voice in the remaining pages. Yet, even as she remains a looming negative space, her minimal contributions heard through cotton, we’re confident she’s our mark. This feeling comes from the preponderance of reported dialogue in the book; main character is our filter for much of it. Nowhere is this strong filter clearer than in the voice of the flighty playwright, main character’s successor, who appears out of nowhere in the final pages: “The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself” (p. 246).
In the end, we have a main character like the high-atmospheric cloud of volcanic ash she describes, “so imperceptible and yet so subject to belief” (p. 247). Almost-nameless main character is, for me, utterly believable and wholly compelling. I’d follow her through more books, in fact, and this is exactly what Cusk has written for her: the Outline Trilogy. I’m confident Cusk maintains the tension introduced here between positive and negative space. She writes with all the knowledge in the world of her characters, even as they’re obscured from us. We are in good hands here.