![]() ![]() In fact, despite narrating in the first person, she reveals virtually nothing about herself. ![]() ![]() The dust jacket calls Outline “a novel in ten conversations,” but that feels slightly inaccurate given that Kaye often acts more like a confessor than a participant. The novel is structured around a series of encounters between a rotating cast of characters - a ruined shipping fortune scion, a flamboyant novelist, a preeminent lesbian poet - and Faye, our writer-protagonist. In Outline - whose economy and intensity often makes it feel like a short story that just happens to be long - Cusk uses unostentatious but immaculately chosen language to convey graspable ideas about marriage, divorce and personal identity that have no less an impact for being so. ![]() The bromide could be applied to Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Outline, about a UK writer who comes to Athens to teach a summer writing course Cusk’s placid, measured prose certainly seems at odds with the sense of exhilaration we get reading it.īut are compelling ideas necessarily complex ones? Is a writing style ever a form of trickery? Personally, I find the opposite to be true: fussy, word-laden sentences can divert attention from a lack of substance (to wit, no one says “deceptively elaborate”). It’s become a book review cliché to describe plain but effective prose as “deceptively spare,” the implication being that some form of legerdemain has been used to conjure deep thoughts from simple words. ![]()
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