Introducing Rachel Cusk

It's always a thrill to make the acquaintance of a novelist with a keen vision uncluttered by irrelevant drama and detail. But Rachel Cusk published her first novel in 1993, so I can hardly claim to be introducing her to anybody. I saw her name on the NY Times list of outstanding twenty-first century novelists and checked one of her books at random—Outline—out of the library.

It didn't take long to notice that Cusk's perspective was unusual and her prose vivid yet strangely muted We learn in the opening pages that the nameless narrator is on a flight to Athens to teach a writing course, but the first thirty pages are largely devoted to the rambling reflections of the nameless Greek man sitting next to her, who she refers to throughout the book as "my neighbor."

Subsequent chapters are devoted to a variety of similar encounters with friends, colleagues, students, and passersby, during which they say a lot, and Faye (the name doesn't appear until near the end of the book) says little. As we read on, curious and perplexed, it becomes increasingly evident that these conversations have not been shaped to produce the kind of complex plot we might expect to see at the theater.  There is no plot. Or if there is, it's a plot that hasn't come to a point of clarity and resolution in the author's head. Cusk is giving us a portrait of a woman carefully observing other people, interacting with them, listening, asking unusual but revealing questions, perhaps giving a word of advice. The judgments she makes about these people can be subtle; they're sometimes brutal, more often elusive.

The narrator, divorced, with two young sons who call her at odd times,  seems to be adrift in a fathomless world, clinging to details in an attempt to sort things out.

At one or two points in Outline the narrator offers a more detailed description of her attitude, as in this minor soliloquy delivered from the deck of a pleasure boat on the Aegean Sea.

I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying - it seemed to me - was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become—to put it bluntly— anathema to me. There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

Many of the characters that surface in the course of the narrative seem to find themselves in varying states of dislocation. For example, in one chapter the narrator meets Paniotis, an old friend, at a bar in a shabby neighborhood in Athens. A long and minutely described scene ensues of ordering wine and food, meeting other guests, listening to their stories.

I asked Paniotis how long ago it was that he had travelled north with his daughter, and he said that it was very shortly after he and his wife had divorced. In fact it was the first time he had taken his children anywhere on his own. He remembered that in the car, driving out of Athens and into the hills, he had kept glancing at them on the back seat in the rear­view mirror, feeling as wrongful as if he were kid­napping them. He expected them, at any minute, to discover his crime and demand their immediate re­turn to Athens and their mother, but they did not: in fact, they made no comment on the situation at all, not during all the long hours of a journey in which Paniotis felt himself to be getting further and further away from everything trusted and known, everything familiar, and most of all from the whole security of the home he had made with his wife, which of course no longer even existed.

It's worth pointing out that although much of the book is devoted to other people telling their stories, little of the material takes the form of dialogue. Far more often, as in the paragraph above, the narrator begins with "he said that" or "she told me that" and fills in all the details herself.

At one point it occurred to me that the novel, though entirely different in tone, bore some resemblance to the works of the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg. This seemed like an odd comparison to me, and I was more than a little surprised to find in Coventry, a book of her essays, that Cusk has written an essay about Ginzburg. The first few lines, I think. offer an accurate description of Ginzburg's approach to life and writing, and of Cusk's as well:

The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been—in some mysterious sense are still being—composed. No context is required to read her: in fact, to read her is to realize how burdened literature frequently is by its own social and material milieux. Yet her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.

I read no further in that essay. Nor did I make an effort to explore the many critical pieces that have been written about Cusk in the course of her prolific career. Instead, I read Transit, the sequel to Outline, which includes portraits of the Albanian workmen who are remodelling the narrator's flat; a long description of Arabian Saluki hounds delivered by one of Faye's writing students; a dinner party at her brother's posh home in a village near Salisbury, where all the women are elegantly dressed and the children run wild; and much else.  

The third volume of the trilogy, Kudos, I'll keep in reserve for a rainy day.