Outline is Rachel Cusk’s first work of fiction for five years. Her last book, Aftermath, was a memoir recounting the fallout from the break-up of her marriage and was so mesmerisingly whiney and narcissistic that it inspired withering Mumsnet threads and in 2013 won Camilla Long of The Sunday Times the Hatchet Job of the Year award for her excoriating review. Cusk’s writing may sometimes be infuriating, self-indulgent and occasionally worthy of a nomination for Pseud’s Corner but, to her credit, it is rarely that most dreaded thing: dull.
Described as “a novel in ten conversations”, Outline centres on the narrator’s trip to Athens to teach a creative writing course and, via her encounters with various people, explores her favoured themes of family, marital breakdown, self-delusion, anxiety, ego. It turns out to be a clever, fresh device that dispenses with the need for much of a plot and presents instead more of a lush human collage. Notably, Cusk satirises the grandiosity and self-absorption of some writers which, given the brickbats that have been chucked at her over the years, may be an ironic bone tossed to her critics. At one point Angeliki, a ghastly, pretentious author whose success has gone to her head, is talking with the narrator in a restaurant. The narrator says something personal that interests her and she shamelessly whips out a notepad and pencil. “I just need to write that down,” Angeliki says, hungrily. “Could you just repeat the second part?”
I imagine that an encounter with Cusk might feel a bit like this. Her writing suggests that she never clocks off, constantly watching and judging, every waking moment mined for material. This is not meant as a criticism; it is what writers do. But Cusk’s observations are often so surgically, unforgivingly precise (in Aftermath she described a disabled landlady with breathing difficulties as a misshapen “witch”), I fancy I’d rather not see how she logged me in her mental jotter. Someone who featured unflatteringly in another of her memoirs, The Last Supper, threatened legal action when they recognised themself in the book. Cusk doesn’t seem to care whether people like her, which is possibly one of her greatest strengths.
It is hard to shake the feeling that Outline’s near-anonymous narrator — writer, mother, recently separated from her husband — is Cusk herself, bruised and damaged from divorce but fractionally warmer for it. It is a rich, thoughtful read, though writers, or at least certain types of the species, do not emerge well, variously described as adults who have failed to grow up or narcissists. One man who had tried to set up a publishing house found that the “writers he had worshipped as the artists of our time were in fact cold and unempathetic people devoted to self-promotion and above all else, to money.” There are some profound insights into human failings and frailty, into lack of self-awareness, though almost every character is in some way irritating, which makes it hard to care much about them.
This includes the narrator, who meets a thrice-married older man on a plane, twice accepts his offer to pick her up and take her out on his boat and then seems surprised when he, with his beaky nose and white-haired hands, clumsily makes a pass, something she describes with merciless skill: “as though the prehistoric creature were wrapping me in its dry bat-like wings, felt his scaly mouth miss its mark and move blindly at my cheek”. If that scene too was harvested from personal experience then let’s hope for his sake that the poor bloke never reads it.
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Outline by Rachel Cusk, Faber, 256pp, £16.99; ebook £11.99. To buy this book for £14.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134