Rachel Cusk, "The Outline Trilogy"

Rachel Cusk discusses her groundbreaking "Outline Trilogy" of novels including, "Outline", "Transit", and "Kudos" at Politics and Prose on 4/3/19.

When Outline appeared in 2015 it was hailed at once as a departure not only from Cusk’s realist fiction, but as a truly revolutionary step in the evolution of the novel form itself. The book introduced Faye, a writer going through a traumatic divorce that changes her relationship to her sons, her work, and herself. The opening volume finds her teaching in Greece and tracks her through nine conversations in which she mostly listens. She remains, yes, an outline. In the second volume Faye is back in England, renovating a house, just as she’s renovating her life. Again, Cusk reveals her through her shadowy role in conversations. Finally, in Kudos, Faye, remarried, travels through an uneasy Europe to a literary conference. In a series of penetrating monologues, Cusk suggests a frustrating elusiveness at the center of these lives focused on language and representation.

Outline:

Transit:

Kudos:

Rachel Cusk is the author of Outline, Transit, the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath, and several novels: Saving Agnes, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Temporary; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Lucky Ones; In the Fold; Arlington Park; and The Bradshaw Variations. She was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.

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Produced by Tom Warren