Rachel Cusk, Pola Oloixarac, the vacuum cleaner
There was a time when, because of my job in the book industry, it would’ve been uncouth for me to write anything negative about a book on the internet. I learned very well how to position my comments about whatever I read so that they faced the light—a skill that I now think on fondly, as I’m quite bored by the ease with which a negative view of anything right now becomes an excuse to discuss it with laziness. (A positive view too, and perhaps that’s equally detrimental, although it’s an argument that’s a little harder to make and one with which I won’t bother.)
I suppose I think of the books that I read like people, each with their own character and energetic texture. I don’t really believe in good and bad people, and I don’t think it does me any good to imagine I would ever have the right to group them into two categories if I did. Books, likewise. I’m less inclined, lately, to “recommend” things to friends and strangers who message me online. Less keen to evaluate the quality of a text and more so to investigate which aspects of something invited me into conversation. Which parts of me did it invite? How?
As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self definition - I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all.
What I found to be personally true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.
Rachel Cusk
In an intensely lonely and isolating year, books have been as much the fabric of community to me as any humans have been; I don’t think I can talk about texts anymore without their relationship to me and to my circular movements in the home. Days at the desk and on the couch and playing fetch with the dog. I’ve been reading so much that things run together—119 books so far this year—and surely it’s on purpose, the feeling like that of being drunk and hanging your head out the passenger window while driving at night. Your friend in the driver’s seat dissolves and the roads and lights blur enough to dissolve and the night up to the present moment dissolves. I’m not so concerned with how little I remember from the piles of books (except perhaps that it makes me somewhat useless at speaking about them); I just want to catch whatever is left when the rest dissolves. Seal it off like a firefly in a coffee can and watch it flick on and off through the holes in the lid.
Nighttime: I was reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline and vacuuming (multi-tasking—an obsession right now as I’m writing about my childhood efforts to prove that it’s possible) when The New York Times app buzzed me with WOMAN FACES MURDER CHARGE AFTER MAN SHAKEN AS BABY DIES AT 35. I opened the article and read just the first few sentences about a babysitter who shook the five-month-old she was sitting decades ago, permanently disabling him, before I returned to Cusk. But the baby’s face from the top of the article stuck to me.
Some forty or fifty pages later, one of Cusk’s characters says he read about a boy in the newspaper just the other day who has “a curious mental disorder” which causes him to seek out risk, often endangering his physical body. The narrator, a woman, muses in explanation that perhaps “he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid, lest it should happen of its own accord.” I stop the vacuum and fall into the couch to underline the passage, its notion of the carrion-circling of control too familiar to me to pass by unmarked.
I spent the next long while, though, trying to puzzle out the relationship between the boy’s being shaken in his childhood and his developing an urge to burn himself and fall from high places. It took receiving a text—the physical reminder of my phone—to recall the separateness of the two stories.
So much of what I might have to say about Outline comes from the minutes I spent trying to puzzle why Cusk would write [what I took to be] a second passage about the boy without reminding a reader of his trauma in infancy. Why the caginess? Why stage his relationship to fear as something so separate from the story of what was likely his earliest and most intense moment of fear? Why tell us about the woman facing murder charges and then turn to the boy, leaving the story of his former babysitter to wither?
Cusk did not, of course, do any of this. The questions are intriguing, though, (to me anyway), in the context of a novel in which the narrator—a writer—mostly is stagnant, while others dip in and out of her space, telling her anecdotes of their own lives. It’s a novel of collection and of turning stories to angle them into conversation with each other inside the mind of a writer. It feels, quite exactly, to be a replica of the experience in my own life I’m so taken by: a head out the window; the dissolution of borders around individual narratives and the rendering of a singular sort of glow or buzz or whoosh.
I haven’t even finished Outline, a book it seems everyone read years ago, and still I feel perfectly comfortable projecting this understanding onto it. Perhaps I am the annoying acquaintance, saying, “You totally seem like the sort of person who would like Nirvana” or “the color green” or “fish tacos” to someone I’ve only just met. Maybe I’m just interested in reading with more of myself. Not as in: bringing my whole self to the act of reading, but as in: creating a more permeable membrane between me and any text—letting myself seep in and the text slip out.
Cusk’s narrator would be in great conversation with the title character of Pola Oloixarac’s Mona, the book about which I long intended to write this first letter. (I mistakenly sent the copy I ordered from a used bookstore to the address of a friend’s dad, who then sent it on to her instead of to me, making a sort of comedy of the thing. I’ll have more to say about it once it finds me again.)
In my memory of the copy I took out from the library some weeks ago, Mona is a Peruvian writer who travels to Iceland because she’s a finalist for a big European literary award. This is projection (the internet scowls at me); Mona actually travels to Sweden. But I have such strong associations in my own memory with Reykjavik and with the far corners of Iceland that it was too easy to place her there instead—just another fictional writer under the pen of a real one and redirected by yet a third, her reader, who insists on setting her somewhere more familiar.
The narrator of Outline travels too, to Athens, to teach a course in writing. I form her world out of my own memories of Greece; it’s by coincidence that I don’t have to move her to another setting as well.
People who don’t like Outline seem to say it’s because the narrator has no self. We don’t learn much about her, and her existence may feel like a slate for the setting down of the stories of others. To some, the book feels pointless and empty as a result. It’s not just Cusk. The “writer narrator” is in a strange spot in our collective readerly tolerance right now. I heard similar critiques last year for Kate Zambreno’s Drifts and more recently for Christine Smallwood’s Life of the Mind, which follow those for Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, and on and on.
Our lazy solution, as readers (particularly of women writers), is to project “nonfiction” onto a novel. The NYT review of Outline tells that it “joins the ranks of recent novels by writers whose portrayals of the self skew the boundary between autobiography and fiction.” I don’t rabidly oppose this speculation as I used to, but it does seem to be applied to women disproportionately.
Perhaps this is just because we prefer women characters who are explicable to us. If this is the desire, Cusk’s narrator is perhaps more frustrating than Heti’s and Zambreno’s, who go deeply internal on the page, turning their minds inside out. The woman in Cusk’s novel instead demonstrates her character primarily through her skillful listening (although she is a masterful observer as well, and it would be easy to argue that her observations tell quite a lot about her). To an American audience, characterization defined by what someone takes in, rather than what they put out, is grounds for uproar. (It feels redundant to say something about misogyny here, but—).
We project woman novelists into their narrators to fill the characters with something; characters who hold blank space in them give us the same discomfort that silence does. I’ll leave it alone, though, because I feel more intrigued just now by how much the reader is invited to insert herself into a novel (rather than how much we’d like to forcefully insert the novelist).
I don’t mean to become the narrator or main character; that feels fraught, particularly when a reader’s identity and experience does not line up with that of a character. So much of Oloixarac’s novel is about the fetishization of Mona as a writer of color (or perhaps I should say “Writer of Color” to be in better alignment with the tone the book uses to approach what it explores with dark humor as a trope of American academia’s fetishizing).
I mean that any reader experiences books in a particular order, in particular rooms or chairs. With more or less information than the next reader. While holding a particular mug, while rubbing an eyelash out of one eye and remembering something from a handful of years or moments ago, because of something a character in the pages said or failed to say or because of a device the author is using well or less so.
I wonder if it is unkind to ask the craft and narrative of books to give themselves over to a certain dissolution over time. I wonder if this experiment in letting things flow together represents a certain disregard for books’ art and for their necessary differentiation. Of that, I’ll say that I feel confident enough in the pages of a book staying steady. I can’t and don’t mean to take their solidness or importance from them. I’ll say, too, that Cusk gives us a great deal of information about her narrator when she has the woman teach her writing class like this: “I asked each one of [the students] to tell me something they had noticed on their way here.” She spends the whole period inviting observations, inviting multiplicitous little lives to coalesce in one room. Teaching her own gift of emptying in order to let the world fill—that gift that is of writing and of reading.
If the story of the novel lives inside the flaps of a book, I’m wondering now where the story of a reading lives. The story of a relationship between a self and a book. Perhaps somewhere between the narrator of a novel and where I left off with the vacuuming. Somewhere in the wind-whipping of nighttime air that dissolves everything else.
Morning: Switched to the audio of Outline from the library app. I do this often, when my eyes get tired—toggle back and forth between pages and sounds—especially this year. It’s comforting to have someone read to me; seems to send my whole nervous system a message of care. Sometimes I miss things when I read this way; I get distracted by a meander inside of my own mind or the neighbor’s endless construction projects out the kitchen window.
I have to switch to the present tense, I think, to explain well enough. (So often I feel this way. I can hear my dad, his slow: have you retraced your steps? His coaxing me along in childhood to find whatever I lost. I’m always trying to find something I’ve lost.)
I’m wiping the kitchen counters and turning to the stove; the reader in my headphones is reciting chapter ten. (The dog hates when I let the readers speak aloud from the phone, so the private pocket of the earbuds is for her.) It’s the last conversation Cusk’s narrator has in the book, and I am, for a moment, frozen. I forget what I was doing because—is the narrator now speaking to herself? For the entirety of the book, she’s listened to and encouraged various characters to tell her of their lives. Now, she’s speaking to a woman named Anne, who just flew to Greece and tells of the conversation she had on the plane with her seat neighbor, a petite Greek man.
I know I stopped paying attention a minute ago when I was winding the vacuum cord (finally) and returning it to the laundry. But. How could I have missed whatever I’ve missed? In the first chapter of the novel, it is the narrator who sits on a plane to Greece. Her neighbor, a petite Greek man, tells of his divorce and woes.
I abandon the countertops for the couch and pick up the book. I reread paragraphs from chapter ten and chapter one completely haphazardly, in no particular order, because the itch of the thought is too much to withstand holding still. I pull up review after review on my phone and read them alongside. All I learn from them is that the narrator’s name is Faye, which is apparently revealed in the last chapter (and which I missed). I had been calling her Anne in my mind, Anne since I decided the woman in chapter ten must be her; she must be talking to herself.
The real Anne came to take the place of Faye in the flat where the narrator stayed for her time teaching in Athens. Anne, too, is in the country to teach writing. In the telling of her conversation with her neighbor on the plane, Anne raises concerns that live in the frame (but peripherally) in the first chapter while Faye listens to her own neighbor describe his life. Anne is nervous to teach Greek students in English; Faye mentions in an aside that her class will be taught in English although the students primarily speak Greek. I’m unsettled and crooked in the couch cushions; I get up to comfort the dog, who is barking, as she does, punctuating the day with adrenaline.
It’s finally in BOOKFORUM that I find some echo of my own reading. (I’ve already self-consciously texted a friend to find out if I’ll make a fool of myself with this idea. Did it just come from my lack of attention? What did I miss?) (He did not read the ending this way but is intrigued.)
In the review: “Cusk implies that Faye has come to redefine herself as an ‘outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.’”
Except it isn’t Faye that Cusk is describing in that passage. It’s Anne.
Anne is telling Faye about how the neighbor on the plane made her feel. Faye is, as the narrator, translating the story for the page: “In everything [the man] said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative… while he talked, she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it.”
“She” is Anne. I’m confused at the BOOKFORUM review. I’d think its author would need to make an argument for the combining of the two characters into one if she were to enact such a dissolution of edges. Perhaps it’s an error (although, of course, then it’s an error that kicks the door open wide for me to read the book as I did).
While Anne tells her story to the narrator, she eats honey “straight from the jar with a spoon,” commenting again and again on her inability to stop trying to fill herself. Her practice sounds so much like our narrator, egging on others for nine chapters to disclose themselves to her, to fill her with stories. Stories, which taste like nothing until they strike a tongue.
But I’ve lost myself. I’m in a chair at the dining table now, hot with the fan stowed away because of the vacuuming from before. My body has to come back to the story because it is, in this case, the vessel for the third degree of honey. I guess this is what I mean. Perhaps the novel doesn’t become a novel until it enters the mind and mouth of a reader.
The broccoli leaves out the window are huge, but, as yet, fruitless. The four or five foot lettuces have gone to seed. Anne and Faye, Cusk’s outlines, are (pessimistically) enacting the ouroboros—swallowing each other’s emptiness and remaining starved. Optimistically, the narrator, in the end, gives space to her own story, letting it be told on the page. I wonder if this undermines the emphasis on her as chasm throughout. On chasm as valuable enough character trait.
I’d like to think not, maybe especially because it’s such a moment of pure literary intrigue—almost as though Cusk uses her final bow to break some fourth wall with a reader. Asking us to dare connecting the dots. Overlaying the images. Dissolving the rest.