And so again I was left thinking about voice/silence, violence/intimacy, control/abandon. This is echoed later when another character talks about being assaulted and then being unable to control aspects of her life in the aftermath (specifically, eating - to me, a proxy for communications of other sorts). Nothing ensued, but it seemed to me deeply implicative of the kind of sudden eruptions of violence people endure - how even in spite of a very controlled, suppressive narrator, we can occasionally be shocked by the cruelty and inhumanity of a change in events.

When he started playing with his pocket knife!? I was certain we were in for a sudden change-in-tack and steeled myself for violence. Most of the novel reads placid, almost deadpan, in its delivery, but I had a creeping sense of doom as she alighted the boat with her “neighbor” and he accelerated recklessly and without warning. It’s hard not to transfer this conversation into a gender studies realm, though there was not quite enough meat on the bone for me to form a complete thought there, as there seem to be many wounded birds in this novel, male and female alike. At the end of the novel, I found myself reflecting on omission, suppression, silence: what’s said versus not in a novel, and by whom. After all, at the book’s end, we know she has children but know very little about them or her relationship or devotion to them, we know she is divorced but know very little of the details, and we know she is a professor but know little beyond that except what we might piece together from he seemingly fast and loose academic technique during a seminar (which is, incidentally, volubly critiqued by one of its students - but even then, we know very little about how she received that criticism). Hers is a kind of anti-narrator who seems to elicit and absorb the stories of all those around her (quite literally, when teaching a writing seminar, but also more informally, in her social relationships and happenstance encounters with strangers) and yet who seems reluctant or unwilling or unable to share her own.

Some of her achievements from a technique standpoint are nothing short of astounding - especially in her presentation of the narrator, a cool and removed and detached presence about whom, at the end of the day, we know very little. Let’s start with this: there is no question that Cusk is brilliant. This book started very strong, took some questionable twists and turns, and left me feeling intellectually challenged and emotionally shortchanged.

Rachel cusk outline review