Contemporary American fiction didn’t begin to grow on me until I started graduate school. Before that, I rarely read American fiction published after the mid-1950's (the Postmodernists and beyond), unless it was controversial or written by Toni Morrison.
What shifted things for me? Focused graduate seminars featuring writers who wrote stories I've never read before. Writers like Erica Jong, Chang-Rae Lee and Dinaw Mengustu pushed narratives beyond what I expected of American novels. I'd thought new American stories were always insular, self-obsessed, like Slaughter-House Five in their polemical drive to promote a brand of North American exceptionalism.
Rachel Cusk's name frequently came up in my graduate seminar classes. Her work was exceptional, certainly not in any kind of polemical way, and it was always the most effective reference point for describing a certain clear yet peripatetic narrative that lulls readers into the fictive dream.
Outline pulls a loose narrative thread through chapers about a woman, a mother, a writer, who's teaching writing for a summer in Greece. On the plane to Greece, she meets a man, her seatmate, who reveals a great deal about himself and his life. This man who apparently never rises high enough in the narrator's esteem to deserve a name, is known exclusively as "Neighbor." He makes appearances throughout the novel, first, after they land in Greece, meeting the narrator for lunch, then inviting her twice to go sailing. She accepts both invitations, even though her general response to Neighbor's character is dominated by consternation and disgust. When the inevitable seduction occurs, she describes the scene as follows:
"There was a certain stiffness in his manner, a self-consciousness, like that of an actor about to deliver a too-famous line. 'I have been asking myself', he said, 'why it is that I find myself so attracted to you.' He spoke so momementously that I couldn't help laughing out loud. He looked surprised and somewhat confused by this, but all the same he came towards me, out of the shade and into the sun, heavily yet inexorably, like a prehistoric creature issuing from its cave. He bent down, moving awkwardly around the coldbox at my feet, and tried to embrace me from the side, putting one arm around my shoulders while attempting to bring his face into contact with mine. I could smell his breath, and feel his bushy eyebrows graing my skin. The great beak of his nose loomed at the edge of my field of vision, his claw-like hands with their white fur fumbled at my shoulders; I felt myself, momentarily, being wrapped around in his greyness and dryness, as though the prehistoric creature were wrapping me in its dry bat-like wings, felt his scaly mouth miss its mark and move blindly at my cheek. Through the whole thing I stayed rigidly still, staring straight ahead of me at the steering wheel, until at last he withrew, back into the shade." (176 - 177)
This description supports Heidi Julavits' front page blurb ("Spend much time with this novel and you'll become convinced that [Rachel Cusk] is one of the smartest writers alive."). That's an opinion on Cusk's writing style. But what are some thoughts on Cusk's narrator? Cusk's incisive (sometimes ascerbic) thinking permeates her narrator's own thoughts and descriptions, but what can we really gather about the narrator when her character is almost entirely revealved through her judgment of others? Clelia, Angeliki, Paniotis, Elena, Melete and Neighbor tell us more (as a mirror reveals its reflection) about the narrator than the narrator ever reveals about herself. The narrator's judgments form the outline of her psychology, and the characters with whom she chooses to spend her time fill it. Only the narrator's writing students, who arrive more or less fully formed, swimming beyond the net of the narrator's initial judgments, are granted a refreshing measure of autonomy. Unlike Neighbor and the narrator herself, each of them have names.
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