Of marriage, for instance, how 'you build a whole structure on a period of intensity that's never repeated,' or of the unsettling and eerie authority that silence has, how it puts people 'out of one another's reach.'īeckett meant them. It's vitally important, because without it, any novel of such static interiority would fail: There are dozens of observations in 'Outline' unexpected enough to stop you on the page, and they're what justify the book's plotlessness. Their authors have gone back inside themselves, as if in Kantian response to how restlessly external the information novel seemed.Īnd Cusk shares their most essential quality, which is an exceptional richness of contemplation. Their subject is the fundamental strangeness and unavailability of the world. These books are pointed, alert, not very funny. Instead, the fashion has turned toward granular introverts like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner and Teju Cole, who write barely novels, all in an ambiguous first-person indistinguishable from the author's own voice. Its proponents are still major figures, from Zadie Smith to Michael Chabon to Junot Diaz. The first, beginning in the late 1990s, produced what was sometimes called 'the information novel' or, pejoratively, 'hysterical realism,' and its dizzy energy suited the frenzied, glossy, techy turn of the millennium. In other words, here we are: smack in the middle of the second dominant style of the novel in our century. 'The novel is infecting us back again, so that we expect of our lives what we've come to expect of our books … this sense of life as a progression is something I want no more of.' That sense of negation extends to her art. 'I had decided to want nothing at all,' she writes, in part, we understand, because of the pain of her failed marriage.

It's about Faye, a Rachel Cusk-type writer, teaching in Greece for a summer, and consists mostly of various conversations she has there with students, artists and a Greek businessman. I couldn't get that out of my head as I read 'Outline,' the new novel by Rachel Cusk. In the conclusion to an essay he wrote about Aerosmith, the music writer Steven Hyden has a funny, damning line about the band's career: 'Aerosmith was a drug-fueled rock band when drug-fueled rock bands were big business, it was a non-drug-fueled rock band when non-drug-fueled rock bands were big business, and now it's barely a rock band when rock is barely in business at all.'

Outline by Rachel Cusk