I don’t just mean references to Brexit or sideways commentary on the state of the publishing industry, though those kinds of things do make an appearance.

Her so-called “Outline” or “Faye” trilogy, feels so much of this time, though I haven’t entirely figured out why. The way she dives straight into the essential question, problem, point of fracture or heartbreak. Her sense of humor, grim and dry, and the way she takes on difficult subjects without looking away. The way emotion is intensely present but not overstated on the page. It’s because of the precision of her writing, her descriptions of individuals, landscapes, rooms, and the atmospheres in the rooms, that are concise and vivid and simultaneously unusual and spot-on. Paradoxical? Perhaps that's exactly what Cusk intended.Rachel Cusk has become my 2019 obsession, by which I mean that her books have been the irresistible ones, the ones I’m compelled to buy despite the piles of unread ones in the house. There are many keen and emotively honed understandings touched and ruminated upon throughout-but all done with such precisely etched skill that it effectively renders large elements of the story with a lack of purchase, to a degree that the whole may well prove as ephemeral, in the long run, as those lived moments that pass us by ere we are forced, through painful intrusion, to behold exactly where we are and what we have become. Cusk is an elegant and skilled writer, rather than a beautiful and/or brilliant one, and I enjoyed this analytically articulated and emotionally intuited combinatory reflection upon the damage wrought by key events and moments in our lived lives-often interpersonal and familial-and the manner in which such nodal pivots can shock us into a stark understanding of life, of awakening a conscious appraisal of one's existence that, in the prior fugal state, was unfolding such that the individual was submerged, in the moment and unreflective, within its temporal flow. I'm rather of two minds about this novel-it's a highly readable and thoughtful episodic commentary on observed and, via those observations, increasingly intensely felt and introspected life and yet, it's held at enough of a remove, presented via a textual implementation so cool and abstract and polished that, I suspect, it will not prove of lasting impression.

Outline trilogy rachel cusk