Outline

He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: 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. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

In Outline, author Rachel Cusk takes to book length the above thesis: By showing a protagonist in conversation with a series of introspective and self-aware characters, and by having this protagonist reveal herself chiefly by her reactions or occasional statements, we begin to see the shape of her through all the things that she is not; we see her by outline (even that opening quote was a story told by someone else). This protagonist, Faye (someone so faintly sketched that we don't even learn her name until nearly the end of the book), is a recently divorced British writer who takes an opportunity to teach a creative writing class for one week in Athens. She spends her time visiting with old friends and their friends (poets and artists and playwrights), the man she sat beside on the airplane from London (only ever referred to as “her neighbour”, as he was originally introduced to the reader on that airplane), and with her students. All of these artists or wannabes speak in aphorisms:

• It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.

• I was suddenly filled with the most extraordinary sense of existence as a secret pain, an inner torment it was impossible to share with others, who asked you to attend to them while remaining oblivious to what was inside you, like the mermaid in the fairy story who walks on knives that no one else can see.

• Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

Very little happens in Outline, and while all of the people she meets have profound stories to tell Faye, she is acutely aware that anything someone tells her is fictionalised to some extent (by lies or by omissions), and I suppose that we are left to see Faye herself – the least well known – as the most authentic. 

While I understand that this is what I'm probably supposed to take away from reading this book, the overall effect for me was lacking. I did enjoy the conversations and the truths they suggested, but they just didn't add up to something bigger in the long run. What does it even mean to be revealed by the blank space one inhabits? Even the largish sans serif font felt like an ironic wink that was going over my head. Looking around, I see that professional reviewers are gaga about Outline (and by “professional” I mean the type who act like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Frantzen's arguments over the fate of the novel are more important than any novels they actually wrote) and I'm left thinking these professionals are the readers for whom Cusk was writing.

I'm pretty excited that this year I was able to find and read the entire Giller Prize longlist before the winner is announced (with weeks to spare). If I were in charge, I'd give the prize to Martin John, and here is my ranked order of the contenders:

The longlist for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize in my order of ranking is:


Anakana Schofield - Martin John 
Marina Endicott - Close to Hugh
Patrick deWitt - Undermajordomo Minor
Heather O’Neill - Daydreams of Angels
Connie Gault - A Beauty 
André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs
Clifford Jackman - The Winter Family
Alix Hawley - All True Not a Lie in It
Rachel Cusk - Outline
Russell Smith - Confidence 
Samuel Archibald - Arvida 
Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

*Won by Fifteen Dogs; not my favourite but fine.

Governor General's Literary Awards English Fiction Finalists: 

Kate Cayley - How You Were Born

Rachel Cusk - Outline

Helen Humphreys - The Evening Chorus

Clifford Jackman - The Winter Family

Guy Vanderhaghe - Daddy Lenin and Other Stories

Happy to see Daddy Lenin take the GG!