Outline and Transit by Rachel Cusk
“We drank the soft, dark wine, so soft it could barely be felt on the tongue.”
These two novels are part of a projected trilogy, which began with Outline, continues with Transit and a third is due to be published.
Outline was startling in its starkness and its daring. An unnamed narrator is travelling to Greece to teach a writing class. She is, at first, but an outline to the reader as we discover very little about her – even her name, Faye, is not revealed at first. Instead we encounter a sense of the woman through her interactions with others: with her pupils in the writing class, with her friendship with the older man she meets on the aeroplane flying to Greece, through her conversations with a fellow writer, an old friend.
The language is sparse and spare – much like the paucity of information about the narrator. And this is but part of the beauty of the read. And yet, through these interactions we glimpse parts of this seemingly elusive narrator. The tone comes through clearly, sometimes maudlin, sometimes dry, sometimes wisely sad: “I said that I lived in London, having very recently moved from the house in the countryside where I had lived alone with my children for the past three years, and where for the seven years before that we had lived together with their father. It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.”
This leads into a discussion of marriage, with Faye recounting her view that, “It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.” While the man’s marriage caused him to “veer off on to a different road altogether, a road that was but a long, directionless detour, a road he had no real business being on and that sometimes he still felt himself to be travelling even to this day.”
Outline is a novel of ideas and conversations, ruminations and truths glimpsed. It is a novel about a woman on the verge of change at a time when you least expect it. Faye writes: “For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives. But for her, coming back out into the world again, the lines were still sharp, the expectations undimmed.”
It is a novel written through the perceptions and stories of others – and I found it magnificent, new, original and gripping. I looked forward to reading Transit, the second volume.
In Transit, Faye is in London, having bought a home that is in need of renovation. The people downstairs are neighbours from hell, and their unpleasantness echoes through Faye’s tentative new life. Once more this is a novel glimpsed through Faye’s interactions with others – from the neighbours to friends, to the renovation team, and so on.
And once more, Faye’s personality shines through. This time it’s her ironic bewilderment at this new life she has found herself in – almost by accident, emerging from the collapse of her marriage, a bewildering time for anyone. And once more there is talk of marriage and life, and of fate: “It wasn’t a question of seeing my femaleness as interchangeable with fate: what mattered far more was to learn how to read that fate, to see the forms and patterns in the things that happened, to study their truth. It was hard to do that while still believing in identity, let alone in personal concepts like justice and honour and revenge, just as it was hard to listen while you were talking. I had found out more, I said, by listening than I had ever thought possible.”
Outline and Transit are slight books in weight – and yet the ideas and thoughts contained in them demand a second read, which serves to reveal other layers, and deepens an understanding of the lives and stories told in them. They are remarkable, clever novels, and Cusk’s artistry shines in these stories of stories.

A short novel, but complete. I think the author does a disservice to call it an outline, unless all of our lives are outlines. Rachel Cusk's brief account of a writing teacher's week in Athens shines outward, rather than feeling self-referential. Her self-effacing interactions with a man she meets on the plane, her students in the writing class and the friends she has meals with illuminate them. I very much enjoyed reading Outline and Rachel Cusk does not bring to mind other fiction writers, though her clarity and knack for pinning down an emotional state is a bit like Alain de Botton's non-fiction. I look forward to reading her other books.

I really enjoyed this, despite some reviews I'd previously read which indicated it was a challenging book. On the contrary, I found it thought-provoking, charming, well-written, by turns amusing and philosophical. Also, an excellent depiction of Athens and Greeks, without ever becoming tourist cliche. A series of vignettes, story-telling grouped around a theme, a bit like an anthropological study.