A Review of “Outline” by Rachel Cusk

 “…over every novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans” (Austen). Oh how the times have changed since Jane Austen wrote this line. We’ve done a full 180 from the press criticizing novels too harshly and not truly ever giving them the chance, to our current present day. Now, we have Outline by Rachel Cusk, a novel whose back cover and first page are littered with outstanding reviews from the press and an actual novel that felt like a 249 page introduction. Though I can appreciate Cusk's style and her ability to describe people, places, and things she had me feeling like a 10th grade English teacher begging her student to not just make the point but expand upon it. Although Outline has received praise for being a reinvention of the novel, its minimalist structure, absence of plot, and emotionally distant narrator ultimately leaves us the reader, with beautifully crafted scenes but no emotional pay off and the feeling of a never ending prologue that doesn’t ever deliver the “deep meanings” it promises. In short, it's not a novel I would recommend.

Before I go to in-depth about why I wouldn’t recommend this particular novel, it’s important we discuss what, in my opinion, makes a novel worth reading. A novel lives in many different people's minds as many different things, but for the sake of this review lets agree that a novel is a longer work of fiction, that is centered on its characters. Now that doesn’t mean having all those things makes a novel good or bad, it just makes it a novel. So what makes a novel worth reading? To me, I want my novel to make a point. A point about something, anything. I want it to have a purpose, something it believes in and strives to make you believe in as well. I don’t think all novels need to be telling the most in-depth crazy stories you’ve ever heard, or trying to convince you of the most outlandish things imaginable, but they must do something! If Outline had succeeded in even conveying to the reader that the color yellow was the best color, or that cats are better than dogs and had been able to genuinely make me feel this way or see it from the author's perspective we would be having a different conversation, but it didn't. Outline didn’t comment, expand, or explain much past its very basic claims. I kept waiting for the other foot to drop and I would finally understand what it was that Rachel Cusk was trying to tell me through her work, that all the lines of the novel that I underlined would click in my head as important. There were times where it felt like we might be getting close to a point and then it would switch, think of a movie where you're about to find out who had committed the crime and it just cuts to a couple sitting on a sail boat.. that's what I experienced this whole book. My favorite example of this is well our main character is talking to Paniotis about the time that he and his children went swimming in a waterfall, he says “that time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing in our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributions to our story of who we were” (Cusk). As an average person my immediate interpretation of this was that Cusk was trying to say that life isn’t about trying to get to the next big accomplishment or step in your journey but it should be more about the little moments in between that we cherish. Thanks to being an English minor and being assigned this novel in my class I got the deeper understanding that she was also making a dig at novels for needing to have a plot or a linear story, making her argument that they don’t need plots to be interesting or make their ideas understood. Which to an extent I do understand and could possibly agree with had she continued on to explore this claim. We get that small snippet of a message and before the reader can even process what it might mean we have zoomed right passed, there is no reasoning behind her argument or explanation. As someone who has received the feedback of  “expand upon this further” a few to many times, I finally understand why it's so important. This passage specifically had me flipping forward to see if maybe she went deeper or if her character, Faye, took a moment to have some self reflection on this beautifully crafted idea that was just placed at her feet. Like they say you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. I originally underlined the passage as just being something that was so beautifully written, then reunderlined it for the sole reason that she had a point. I truly think if Cusk had been able to expand on this and give some reasonings as well written as that passage that maybe she would have one more person on her side. But alas it is just another gorgeous bundle of words with no real take away. Cusk has written a thesis statement of a book and left the rest of the essay blank. 

Ultimately I don’t think that this is a Cusk issue alone, her work is a reflection of recent trends. The rise of writing for either the reviewer or for the reader as I would like to call it. Critics have begun to praise books such as Outline and other works of autofiction and similar texts as stories of restraint and intellect. Whereas to the general public as everyday readers this trend tends to fall short, it starts to raise the question, as we are with this review, what do we really want from our novels. Now as someone who reads not just for school but also for pleasure, I can say that I disliked this novel in both of those contexts. Though I am no book critic I would like to say my few years of schooling may give me a slight advantage in the discussion of books that perhaps a normal person would not have. That being said I want to talk about why I think it is that critics are choosing these types of books to place their praise on and not the books of the general interest. One of these reasons is that it is, in and of itself trendy.. to not like the trendy thing. We have moved into a time where critics would rather a novel showcase the cleverness of the author for not conforming to the average reader interest than actually writing an interesting novel. The prized novel in a review now is one that values abstract ideas, cleverness, and structural experimentation over engagement or genuine connection with the story itself. I would also like to point out that this was one of my biggest issues with Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man but the difference between Joyce and Cusk is that though it aggravated me Joyce has a plot and development to his characters, even if it was really only shown in language and style. It was there in a way that perhaps I am just failing to see with Rachel Cusk's work. Cusk actually comments on her own lack of a plot in Outline itself as on page 99, well we are again talking to Paniotis and he has this to say about the novel, “The story of improvement, to the extent that it has commandeered our deepest sense of reality. It has even infected the novel, though perhaps now the novel is infecting us back again, so that we expect of our lives what we’ve come to expect of our books; but this sense of life as a progression is something I want no more of” (Cusk). In this passage at the very least she is making it apparent that she is commenting on the novel and what it is she does not like about it. Still she continues to not expand on that point anymore than the short quote I have pulled. It's safe to say me and Rachel Cusk have very different points of views on what makes a “good novel”. Once again this description of her thought through the story of another character is cool to read but it ends there. She could have just written “see I don’t need a plot just because that's what you all expect and want” and we all would have gotten the same take away points from this novel. I think in the end what frustrates me the most about Outline is not its lack of plot or emotional depth, but the fact that Cusk and critics mistake her rejection of these things as artistic innovation. We are meant to believe that refusing plot and narrative structure is enough to make the book good, as if the lack of design is itself the design. But the novel, when it is true to its core, is a work of art. Art is a form of expression, it's been used since the beginning of recorded human history to convey the feelings and messages that we can not when we are no longer here. An average person doesn’t look at a painting to admire the brush strokes; they look to see the time, effort, and emotion that was poured onto the canvas by the author. A novel is the same, we read to be able to look behind the curtain of the plot and find what the author was trying to tell us the entire time. It's what makes a novel exciting, there is a reason people say they read to escape. Now to play devil's advocate for a second there are those that go to museums to look at the brush strokes on the canvas and admire the type of paint that was used, but those people are critics and art connoisseurs. Outline would be a great painting for those people, but for the everyday consumer who is looking to ignore the fact that life is boring for like 5 minutes, it's not all that great of a painting. We understand that our lives are not as magical as those of the characters in our novels, why do you think people are reading them? People want that feeling of understanding and being understood well also not feeling like life is a pointless unexciting experience. This novel does not deliver that for the average person. Personally it feels that Cusk has painted her picture for the art critics and doesn’t seem to care much for the opinion of the common museum goer. 

In the end, I don’t think anyone could sum up my feelings about this book better than Cusk herself, as she chose for the final word of her novel to be solitude. I would like to mirror that sentiment by saying that her book made me feel just that… isolated, suspended, and waiting for something that would never arrive. I respect her artistic style and truly had so much hope for this novel, but at the end of the day a sketch of a portrait isn’t a masterpiece, and the structure of a book with no plot isn’t a novel. A novel doesn’t have to follow conventional structures, but it must provide the reader with something: a takeaway, a cause, a drive to experience. Though the critics may not agree with me or with the fact that I think this novel was written for their praise. I hope I speak for the general population when I say that if the heart of a novel is its ability to move us, challenge us, or interest us, then I hate to say it, but Outline never truly had a pulse.