A Review of Outline or an Outline of a Review?

A vacation reading rec from the vacation-bound

As I get ready to fly out to Aruba for a week, and come to terms with the fact that the next installment of How Social Media Is Killing the Essay, isn’t ready for your eyes, I thought I’d share a review of a pool-friendly read written in the good ol’ days when I knew how to keep it short and sweet. If you don’t travel anywhere this summer, this book will make you feel like you did.

As always, thanks for subscribing and I’d love to hear what you’re reading!

XO,

Jesse

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The first book in Rachel Cusk’s acclaimed trilogy, Outline can inadequately be described as a series of conversations an English writer has during her travels to Athens to teach a summer writing class. A brilliant execution of technique that marries style and substance seamlessly and originally, it reminded me of the brightest stars of High Modernism, my favorite period.

How about dat “voice” tho? It is so detached and ghostlike it can hardly be called a voice at all. Unlike detached narrator predecessors like, say, Clay in Less Than Zero, Cusk’s protagonist possesses a nearly total blankness that verges on incorporeality, which reminded me of the first person POV of Gaspar Noé’s spectacular 2009 Enter the Void, filmed nearly entirely from the perspective of a spirit no longer occupying its body.

In her Piscean airiness, Cusk reminds me a lot of Virginia Woolf, a goddess shining over the earth, translating the material into the abstract, vaporous essences that hover over us in a realm of their own. The result is a stately, contemplative vision that boils everything down to its meaning, giving us the actuality of things instead of their crass reality.

Every conversation fills out a little bit more space around the narrator, gradually forming an outline of the protagonist. The stories themselves reflect each other in a way that reminds me of the The Symmetry Teacher, a short story collection by the great Russian postmodernist, Andrei Bitov — shading in certain parts of the narrator’s image more and more deeply — until what emerges is a cipher of a person suffering a transformative loss. Like catching a sudden glimpse of a ghost who has suffered some tragic end, it’s at once disquieting and utterly moving.