Category Archives: Books

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.

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This review was originally published in Daybreak, an email blast for the Upper Valley of VT/NH, in January 2025.

A read for anyone who’s ever thought about the topic, Death and Other Speculative Fictions is often warm, funny, and seriously playful. Its main concern is the death and possible fictive resurgence of Hagood’s beloved father. This is truly a volume of prose poetry, each entry a whole in itself. You could flip to any chapter (each a fraction of a page long) and find insight and entertainment there. Yet each segment talks to the others in many voices; as the subtitle states, this is also an essay, and it reveals much in the sequential reading.

First and foremost, there’s the throughline of cultural depictions of death, from Cicero to Nabokov to Blade Runner. The book takes cues from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Dracula to the latest Mad Max joint, Furiosa. Then there’s the voice of Hagood as the mother of young children, doing everyday, motherly things as she disbelieves the very idea of life without her own father—another abiding theme. There’s a coming to terms with death and life, the spectacular in the mundane (I think particularly of Hagood’s journey to her father’s deathbed, which takes place over multiple chapters and the fringes of reality).

For Hagood, her father’s death is ultimately a crisis that plays out on more than one level. It’s emotional, of course, but it’s also existential. She’s a writer, and a professor of writing, who now understands the inadequacy of words. “It really takes a tragedy to make you see that words never really encompass us.” This is a development from the book’s beginning, where Hagood called the book an attempt to conjure up her dead father, to meet him on another plane. Ironically, it’s her poetic ascension to a plane where distinctions between life and death fade that also shows her the failure of words. She’s written herself into surpassing writing.

“We are all linked…there aren’t as many distinctions as I once thought. Everything is permeable” between people, between people and the world, between life and death. “Death has taught me the true architecture. Now, when I walk around Brooklyn, I imagine the roof and walls of all the apartment buildings removed, revealing the people crouched inside, trying to be people, so close to others while not realizing it, not actually alone.” Hagood expects to settle with the physical reality of death as simply and magically as being a mother: “When it finally comes, bedraggled, I will take it into me as I’ve soothed my terrified children so many times by the smell of my skin alone.”

In the 100-odd prose-poem chapters, there’s plenty of space for humor here, and lightness, in addition to satisfying resolution. It’s an enlightening and emboldening read. You might wind up feeling like Hagood is a friend, so welcoming and delightful is her voice. And you’ll definitely appreciate, with her, “how every instant we get is a shattering miracle.”

There’s a breathless scene of near-tragedy in the first third of The Shipping News that will wrench anyone who’s ever been caretaker of anyone else. It’s just one of countless more-or-less peripheral tragedies that strike glancing blows throughout the book, a novel largely set in the maritime roughs of Newfoundland, where tragedy comes like seal-flipper pie: dark, oily testament to the power of the wilds.

Yet it’s Annie Proulx’s descriptive horsepower that marks the novel more than anything else for me. Flip to any page and you’ll find her painting scenery and characters in achingly lovely prose with a cream-top of mischief or foreboding, a skill that can turn a character’s face into “a pricked pastry” or send a bay crawling “with whitecaps like maggots seething in a broad wound.” It’s this sensory richness, people and landscapes described as injury, as food, as smell and sound, that made me feel full at the end, as though I’d taken a trip and felt more human for it, upon return.

Another aspect contributing to this is the intimate introduction to a lifestyle and a people that Proulx conveys. Here we know characters’ innermost motivations and histories, their predilections and pet-peeves. Proulx portrays Newfoundlanders who take tragedy like others might take soup with their sandwich: a matter of course, part of the full meal of life. Which is not to say tragedy hurts less. Here we have characters still whipped raw by losses and misdeeds suffered years, decades ago. Tragedy is nothing if not a consistent bedfellow, wedded to the survivors in searing rings of sorrow, shame, rage. For this land incapable of luring back citizens once they leave, one of the few who can return is main character Quoyle, he who still suffers great tragedy like a local, betrothed to his own loss. Loss is his ticket back: While typically “the few who came back were altered in temper as a knife reclaimed from the ashes of a fire,” Quoyle is still raw and aflame with it. Loss never leaves him, and so, once back, he’ll never leave Newfoundland. Quoyle’s own tragedy is why he initially returns to the land of his forebears and the framework for all else that happens. Perhaps Newfoundland demands nothing less.