Rachel Cusk is one of my favorite writers of all time. Her literary passion is veiled in the glow of perfect tone and pace and an introspection that goes beyond the mundane realities of the stories she is telling --- stories of real people who don’t always have the control to change or even affect the world around them in the ways they would wish. OUTLINE is her latest novel and perhaps her most beautifully rendered and provocative at the same time.

A novelist goes to Greece to teach writing. She is on an airplane musing about her life, but quickly her attention turns to the gentleman next to her who goes on to elaborate on the specifics of his own life. She listens --- more patiently than any of us would. It is a pattern that occurs again and again throughout the book. Through the 10 conversations the narrator has over the course of her trip, we learn about her in relation to the things that are revealed to her about others’ lives. It is through their experiences that she learns more about herself than maybe she would have hoped.

"The book establishes itself as a special event because of the way that Cusk takes the narrator on a less-than-obvious journey and asks us all to put on our thinking caps and bask in her discoveries, as well as enjoy the stories of those she encounters.... an awe-inspiring literary achievement."

Perhaps my favorite thing in the book happens early on, as the man on the plane rattles on about his second marriage. Our narrator actually criticizes his storytelling: “I remained dissatisfied by the story of his second marriage. It had lacked objectivity; it relies too heavily on extremes, and the moral properties it ascribed to those extremes were often incorrect…. Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative, but in this story the two poles had become disassociated and ascribed separate, warring identities.” This is not a series of complaints that we as readers could make about Cusk’s storytelling abilities.

She assigns her students books that inspire her, like SONS AND LOVERS by D. H. Lawrence, and is dismayed by the lack of passionate response to it. She goes swimming with the older man who lives next door to her for the summer and watches the other writers on her trip discover romance. Like the violinists in Titanic, she never stops imagining, no matter how painful the feelings the other person’s musings bring up in her, how these revelations and characters could make their way into something she herself could write. Even as she faces down a personal crisis with this work trip, the narrator allows the experiences of others to help her define herself.

Most writers can’t handle this type of tricky affair. But in this day and age, when all the world’s people are defining and redefining themselves for the entertainment of a vast unknown audience on Twitter and everywhere else, it is remarkable to think that it is the negative space left by the constant posturing and self-importance of most people that can help one person find the path to their better realized self. It is a parlor trick only the best writers could pull off, and Cusk does that with flying colors.

The stories that the characters tell the narrators are like fever dreams --- sometimes stunning, sometimes insane, sometimes hard to swallow --- but they are of interest to the reader. The book establishes itself as a special event because of the way that Cusk takes the narrator on a less-than-obvious journey and asks us all to put on our thinking caps and bask in her discoveries, as well as enjoy the stories of those she encounters. OUTLINE is an awe-inspiring literary achievement.