Rachel Cusk, Outline (2015)

There is something about the texture of Rachel Cusk’s prose in Outline (and in the novel’s two follow-ups, Transit and Kudos) that feels different from anything you’ve ever read before. It’s ostensibly a novel about a woman teaching creative writing in Athens, but it’s really just a series of conversations—importantly, conversations as she remembers them, filter after filter. There’s no real plot, and I’m at a loss to fully describe why the novel is so captivating. Probably, it’s because, as Heidi Julavits put it, it is “lethally intelligent . . . Spend much time with this novel and you’ll become convinced [Cusk] is one of the smartest writers alive. Her narrator’s mental clarity can seem so hazardously penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure.” That will do it. Once, on the subway, I saw a young woman reading Transit and a young man reading Outline, both in the appealing Picador editions. They were standing very close, but they were facing away from one another, and didn’t seem to be together. It took all I had not to stand up and tug on their sleeves—not only because of the perfect meet-cute, but because these books feel like a kind of shibboleth, that rare bit of artistic consumption that might actually tell you something about a person, and how their mind works, and the ways to access their heart. I got off before either of them. I hope they turned around and found each other. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor