Bristol24/7 Reads: Outline by Rachel Cusk

The Bristol24/7 book club met via social media over May to discuss the book Outline by Rachel Cusk. Bristol is no stranger to this Bailey’s Women’s Fiction shortlisted author.

In 2009, she published the Last Supper where she was accused of sneering at Bristolians. She couldn’t forget their slavery past, their bigotry and lack of understanding of social justice. As she wrote:

“Something of the hard-heartedness of that imperial past seemed to live on in the people I met and spoke to every day. Man, woman and child, they found sensitivity intolerable. Nothing irked them more than the liberal conscience, unless it was an outspoken sense of injustice. These things impinged on their free bigotry, and on the sense of humour that depended on it.” In Clifton, she “encountered notions of Christian charity that might have come from the pages of a Victorian novel, so ignorant did they seem of the concept of social democracy…”.

When she hated her own characters in the fictive Arlington Park – a thinly disguised Clifton – Bristolians disliked her a bit more. There is a Mumsnet forum called If you loathe Rachel Cusk, you’ll love this.

Rachel Cusk seems to have a history of clashes with a lot of the population. When she wrote about motherhood in A Life’s Work she was castigated and the media warned women not to read it lest they choose not to get pregnant.

“As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness,” she wrote about the public reaction. “I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next. This time, it was different. Again and again people judged the book not as readers but as mothers, and it was judgment of a sanctimoniousness whose like I had never experienced.”

“Despite the number of people who had praised and admired it, and the letters I received to that effect from readers, I regretted, constantly, the fact that I had written A Life’s Work.”  

A Life’s Work was republished in 2008.

Well, Cusk seems to have finally decided enough is enough, at least in terms of writing, and in her latest novel, Outline, she nearly completely extricates herself from the story. Unfortunately, she has such trouble realising that the story doesn’t have to be about her that she leaves us with barely any narrator at all. At least none to be of interest. 

She has been hounded so much for sneering and hating her characters that, perhaps in response, she refuses to judge these ones at all. Plots in past books have been seen to be so closely linked to her own life that she gets rid of the one in Outline. 

What we’re left with is barely a novel but instead, a set of characters telling small parts of their own stories.

Some suggest that the lack of a clear plot means we can focus on Cusk’s writing, which in the past has often been magical in its ability to imbue the reader with the protagonist’s emotions:

“When I was a child the night seemed as big as an ocean to me, deep and static: you rowed across it for hour after hour and sometimes got so lost in time and darkness that it seemed as if the morning might never be found. Now it was a mere vacuum, filling up with human activity as a dump is filled with discarded objects. It was an empty space in which the overcrowded world was extending its outskirts, its sprawl.”

Bristol was the dump. It was the overcrowded world that was extending into her nights. The Last Supper is one of her three non-fiction works but her fiction works seem to carry her reality in them as well. 

So what do we think of Cusk’s writing now? Well, here are some of our replies:

“I’m still not sure what the point of it is. I didn’t mind it, but it wasn’t quite interesting enough to be a really readable novel, so I feel like I’m missing something and there must be some hidden cleverness,” writes Katharine from Bristol24/7 Reads.

“I’m not gripped by this book, perhaps because there is no consistent plot underlying each story. The writer is very descriptive of the environment and I find it very easy to imagine the physical, but there seems to be no emotion, very little is given away,” says Lydia.

“My impression, which is perhaps unfair, is that it is because it is a slightly pretentious overwritten book,” says Katharine.

It’s hard to disagree with these opinions. Outline reads like a story without a context. As if facts can ever just be facts without someone to put them in order and help us make sense of the world. 

Cusk tries a different approach. As she writes in Outline, trying to give us a clue: “in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.”

It’s not difficult, with Cusk’s history, to see this work as a reaction to past criticism. Outline is like an abrogation of the author’s purpose and right to tell us what to think and what to feel. Cusk seems to be saying ‘I give up. If you think you know so much about me then go ahead and figure out what I’m doing this time around too’. 

Her attitude reminds me of when my eldest daughter was three and she started getting cross with her cartoons, which these days seem to be more interactive than previously. “Count with us to 10,” Mickey Mouse would ask of her and she would shout, “No! Do it yourown” (she used to get ‘yourself’ muddled with ‘yourown’). Now that she’s four and is a big girl she no longer sulks at being asked to take part, perhaps because she can now count effortlessly. 

Well, Cusk is still sulking and wants us to do it – discover who she is – ‘ourown’. 

Not everyone is willing to put in that work. She herself fails to get the important details right. Our narrator spends two weeks in Athens but fails to note the Greek names correctly: her friend’s name ‘Paniotis’ is more likely to be the Greek name Panagiotis and Georgiou is a surname not a first name. 

Some members of our group weren’t interested enough to finish Outline but one who has, has written an excellent review.  

We weren’t convinced by her attempt to hide behind others’ stories and tell us that we don’t know her. We know you, Rachel. We just don’t believe your point of view.  

Next month’s read will be How To Be Both by Ali Smith. Join in on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.