6/21/2023 0 Comments Rachel cusk's outline(The many characters in Arlington Park often seemed like figures in a tapestry, their interior lives beautifully detailed but rarely surprising.) Unlike them, Outline, which slowly submerges us in the narrator’s isolated post-divorce life, disavows the novel as a channel for psychological interiority. (Cusk has cited Knausgaard as an inspiration, although the novels feel very different.) It’s looser and more ironic than her earlier novels, which, whatever their real strengths, often felt willed and a bit airless, as if Cusk had a thesis about the dreariness of married life she was out to prove. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Outline flouts the usual boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. What happens when a writer loses his or her faith in fiction? In Cusk’s case, she renounced her usual painstaking fictional worlds in favor of something messier, and the result, ironically, may be her finest novel.
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