The outline of a life – is that what is meant by the title of this celebrated “autofiction” bestseller from 2014? I read it thusly, because this book dips in and out of the life stories of a series of characters, and provides middle age sophistry as commentary. I found it quite charming.
I am always tragically late to all books with buzz, probably because the buzz ticks me off, and it is impossible to know if there is any redeeming quality to the book once the dust settles. I have found that the dust will have settled about six years after publication, so I tried this book out on a whim. Well, that’s only part of the truth – it was also a curiosity about what passes for contemporary fiction these days that brought this book to my attention. It is part of a trilogy of books, all supposedly written in the same style, published 2014-2018. And it is a very peculiar style indeed.
The story concerns a writer, about to spend a week as a guest lecturer in creative writing in Athens. She meets people during this week, whose lives are explored in detail. Not much is said about the main character, she more or less goes around as a vessel for the other stories, which makes for quite an unusual effect. I took this as a possible comment on how certain men annoyingly overshare and take over conversations – but later in the novel the same procedure goes for the women. A little trick that Cusk uses (that I’ve noticed elsewhere in newer fiction, I wonder where it comes from? possibly magazine journalism) is to mix first person narration with spoken lines of the characters, which produces a mesmerising effect. Something like this, from the beginning of chapter seven:
I said it looked very impressive, and we got out of the car and sat at a table, beside one of the palm trees. It was important, he said, to remember to enjoy yourself along the way: in a sense, this had become his philosophy of life these days.
It is a middle aged person thinking about life, surrounded by other middle aged persons thinking about life, too. I’ve never read a book that explicitly deals with thoughts on the life course. Most closely maybe Annie Ernaux, Nina Bouraoui or possibly Benjamins bok by Bo Carpelan (a book someone recommended to me). Maybe the Sports Writer by Richard Ford? But all these books are about one character dwelling on aging, Cusk’s unique contribution is to provide a chorus of voices – and this without even giving the protagonist much space at all.
The story is quite secondary, the main event is the composition. In short, she meets a man on the plane who takes her out on a boat, she has lunch with an Irish fellow guest teacher, she meets with a Greek literary agent and a local writer. And she describes her teaching sessions, where the students talk about their assignments. I don’t know how much of this is based on lived experience, and I wonder how knowing that would change my perception of the book. I also thought about whether there is any larger theme to this purported trilogy, or if it just keeps going in the same style. I might return to volume two at some point. We’ll see…
Kinship of all Species 