Rachel Cusk’s ‘Outline’

I was out to dinner recently with a man who observed of a mutual friend: “He’s a cipher. He just stands there and doesn’t speak.” He felt our friend did not pull his weight in social situations. I countered that there were participatory ways of saying nothing; that I experienced our friend’s silence as encouragement to display, for his appreciation and scrutiny, the more typically hidden parts of myself.

The narrator of Rachel Cusk’s lethally intelligent novel, “Outline,” is a cipher who inspires other people to confess. In her presence, they divulge stories about their wives and husbands and mistresses, their parents and children and careers. The narrator’s bio, meanwhile, remains faintly sketched. She is a woman. She lives in London. She is the mother of more than one child. She is divorced. She is a novelist teaching a summer writing course in Greece.

Cusk, who has written three memoirs, shares basic life details (English, novelist, mother, divorced) with her narrator, meaning this novel joins the ranks of recent novels by writers whose portrayals of the self skew the boundary between autobiography and fiction. Aside from these quasi-­generic data points, however, we acquire few additional facts about the narrator. The most telling personal detail she reveals is her desire to “find a different way of living in the world,” one that involves coming “to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.”

Still, stuff happens to her. The novel documents the narrator’s social encounters as she flies from London to Athens, teaches her writing classes, meets people for dinner, goes for boat rides. (Perhaps the novel with which “Outline” shares a bit more genetic material is J. M. Coet­zee’s “Elizabeth Costello,” a portrait of a writer assembled via her lectures on topics such as realism and eros, in which the chapters are called, with some irony, I think, “lessons.”) During these encounters, the narrator does not appear to interact with people as much as absorb their stories. She’s the invisible interlocutor — the medium. Being with her, one man tells her, “reminded him of episodes in his own life he had not thought of for many years.”

While the narrator is rarely alone, reading “Outline” mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk’s literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this novel and you’ll become convinced she is one of the smartest writers alive. Her narrator’s mental clarity can seem so hazardously penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure.

Cusk is also — this sounds ridiculous — but she is also noticeably an adult. She writes about adult topics with sagacity and authority. Well-worn subjects — adultery, divorce, ennui — become freshly menacing under her gaze.

Among the many striking tensions in this novel — in which people do nothing but talk — is how quiet it is. During her social encounters, the narrator filters out most of her questions and remarks. While we hear almost nothing but her voice, we rarely witness her using it. She is not only disembodied from her life — her children, back in London, do not regularly preoccupy her — she feels to be without a body, neutered. This redaction reads as emotional survival. Following what we assume to be many unspecified romantic disappointments, she says that she is “not interested in a relationship with any man, not now and probably not ever again.”

But it might also read as a strategy born from experience — the narrator’s and maybe, too, the author’s. Cusk, who has written memoirs about her years as a young mother (“A Life’s Work”) and about her divorce (“Aftermath”), tends to inspire both adulation and fury. Her failure to be properly indoctrinated into the “cult” (as she calls it) of motherhood earned her the distinction of “the first literary Bad Mother” (impressively beating out Medea, Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing, i.e. no mean feat); “Aftermath,” meanwhile, in part explores the breakdown of her marriage and her struggle to reconcile her personal experiences with the feminist ideology. As she said in an interview with The Guardian following the publication of “Aftermath,” “Sex, marriage, motherhood, work, domesticity: it is through living these things that the politics of being a woman are expressed, and I labor this point because it is important to understand that the individual nature of experience is at odds — or should reserve the right to be — with any public discourse.”

That Cusk struggles with emotional versus intellectual (and private versus public) gender pressures and desires is what makes her work both incendiary and divisive. She is willing to say what is true for some — ergo true — and complicated but is often neither politic nor pretty. (I found “A Life’s Work” both revelatory and maddening; Cusk provides herself no special dispensations, but she can sometimes seem a bit naïvely flummoxed by the comparative luxury of her bad situation.) In the preamble to the Guardian interview, Cusk’s interlocutor writes that she has “told of her experience of being a woman in a manner that is in no way comforting. Women writers do not tend to do this and get away with it.”

A while back, the writer Rivka Galchen, visiting a writing seminar of mine, was asked by a student why she made the main character of her novel “Atmospheric Disturbances” a man. She replied that if her emotionally remote and highly cerebral narrator were a woman, that narrator would be called unlikable at best, unbelievable at worst. Galchen’s suspicions were confirmed when, six years later and in this publication, David Bezmozgis reviewed her second book, “American Innovations,” a collection of short stories narrated by emotionally remote, highly cerebral women. In one story, a woman “flees to Mexico City, leaving behind a husband and daughter who factor minimally.” The narrator calls home and does not ask about her daughter, because she tells herself that children are “very resilient and flexible, and one shouldn’t let other people tell one otherwise.” Bezmozgis asks, “Is it plausible that a mother would feel this way?” He clearly doesn’t think so.

Cusk’s narrator — who has left home, whose family factors minimally — renders inane such incredulity by reproducing the stories of both men and women as a means of hinting toward her own. By freeing the narrator of a body, the novel allows readers to accept a more complex portrait of a person — a self instead of a set of gender stereotypes. The result is a heartbreaking portrait of poise, sympathy, regret and rage, and with this book, Cusk suggests a powerful alternate route for the autobiographical novel. She is too skeptical and thorough, however, not to interrogate her indirect methods of “self” presentation. At one point, a woman with whom the narrator is sharing an Athens apartment addresses the perils of choosing silence, asking, “If people were silent about the things that had happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them?” As “Outline” nevertheless proves, what’s documented is as telling as what is left out. The silent are as voluble as those who speak. Reading Cusk’s novel, I was reminded of a Dick Cavett anecdote about his Montauk neighbor Andy Warhol, who kept two tape recorders running in his backyard. Cavett inquired about the presence of the second tape recorder; was it in case the first machine broke? No, Warhol supposedly responded. The one is recording the other.