Outline

I'll read anything Rachel Cusk writes. I've long admired her intelligence and her sure-footed style, and the way she will break the surface of her stories and demand you ponder something big and abstract. I'm not so sure I'd want to meet her, though: she's often seemed prickly or slightly unhinged. But in her new novel, Outline, she seems to have arrived somewhere unexpected, where the light of her knowledge is gentler, more forgiving, and she does "not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything." The story of a narrator who listens to the stories of others and thereby reveals her own, Outline has an openendedness that made it an entirely new reading experience for me, and made me think that perhaps I might want to meet this literary hero of mine after all.