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This post features another book review, and yet it’s so much more than a review. Writing this review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a fantastic opportunity for me to talk about literary fiction. What it should be and what it doesn’t care about.

Often on this blog I talk about over-explaining in fiction, or about realistic characters versus insignificant plots. Rachel Cusk’s Outline is one of the best examples of what high-quality (literary) fiction ought to be.

Outline is not perfect (we’ll talk about its flaws in a while), but as an example it’s near-flawless. In other words, it’s great teaching material.

Review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline: Genre, Plot, Narrative

As I said just above, Outline is great teaching material. This is particularly intriguing considering the plot follows the footsteps of an anonymous narrator in Athens, Greece, where she has gone to teach a short writing course. The self-referential nature of the novel is a marker of literary fiction; the first checkbox, if you will.

There are several themes parading through the pages of this short novel, and literary production is one of them. It comes either directly, in the form of writing stories and what the process means to people, but also indirectly, in the form of all the little narratives we tell ourselves and others in order to construct an identity, a meaning, or our entire life.

A Plot that Is Incidental

Another great marker of a literary-fiction work is that of a plot that is entirely incidental, almost a necessary evil. There is very little happening in terms of a storyline. Deep down, the plot is little more than meetings and discussions among people, though some of them take place in peculiar (and highly symbolic) settings: a sailboat; an old-fashioned taverna; the dark cabin of an airliner.

The narrative ping-pongs between past and present, between one person’s objective recollection and another’s dismissal of it as subjective. We never really read anything concrete, we never discover what has happened to any of the characters; only what they think it has.

Deep down, the novel is a never-ending journey toward self-discovery. Each character brings some precious chunk of enlightenment with them, yet at the same time it feels as if each morsel of truth and comprehension only reveals how far the voyager still is from the conceptual shore of illumination.

Review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline: Characters

As I often say, characters are everything in literary fiction and plot is nothing. This is literally true in Outline, as we just saw. If we need to find any flaws in the novel, those exist in the way characters are portrayed, however, this doesn’t mean what you think it does.

The characters of Outline are very realistic, with wholly believable insecurities, self-reflections, and inner worlds. Their desires are real, and so are their fears.

An Allegory of Picking Characters

The problem lies in the way the author has chosen these specific characters. In other words, any shortcomings in realism originate from the fact that the characters populating the novel are not entirely representative of society at large.

Most of them are upper-class, having a long line of failed or failing marriages behind them. Even the several Greek characters of the novel are a bit too posh, virtually unrecognizable.

In a way, there is an allegory hidden there: Are our lives not defined by the people we choose to include in them? Does not the choice of staying with a cheating husband or a loveless wife a traceable prerequisite of misery? Characters in Outline discover this very fact, and the readers discover it too, both directly and indirectly.

Review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline: General Impression

Outline is not a perfect book, let alone a masterpiece. But it’s fully aware of what it is: a literary-fiction novel that, although not flawless in terms of execution, is eminently self-aware of itself and of what literary fiction should be.

When all is said and done, Outline is a story about being a stranger in your own soul. To this reader (a native Greek speaker who has lived in Athens for the first 20 or so years of his life), Athens is almost unrecognizable. Ditto for the Greek characters of the novel, who appear as what I imagine literary photoshopping would be.

Tellingly, the author has – I speculate deliberately – misspelled several Greek names, including that of the Benyaki [sic] museum. It happens a bit too often to be an error.

Could it be that Outline is a long, meandering metaphor for estrangement, in the most intimate sense of the word: that towards our own self?