Outline

(When asked, I often forget what I've recently read: I'm usually too absorbed in my current book. I'll try to keep better records in 2019. Each post will be a finished book.)

Outline by Rachel Cusk takes place over the course of a few weeks in Athens. The narrator has ten conversations--with strangers, with colleagues, with students--as she teaches a writing class and attempts to find meaning after her divorce. It's good. The sentences are precise and composed, like Marilynne Robinson. The subject matter is everyday and observational, like Karl Ove Knausgaard or W. G. Sebald. And the meaning of the novel (what's within the "outline" of the title) is submerged, like Hemingway's iceberg, cloaked in hints and allusion. Lately I've enjoyed plotless, oblique works that circle around an unspeakable main idea.

Outline is the first in a trilogy. The second volume, called Transit, is on my shelf and I'll probably read it a few books from now. I finished Outline on a rainy afternoon when I'd come home from school and my daughter was still asleep. My wife was checking the patient list at the hospital: she had to work the next day and wanted to know what to expect. A few pages before the end, I looked up and saw three teachers run past our house. They run every Tuesday and Thursday. We waved at each other through the glass and they disappeared down the street.