It is as if she has renounced all personal agency and narrative authority. Faye, neutral as a blank page, listens to each of them in turn, sometimes passing judgment, but more often leaving it to the reader to decide how to interpret what we have heard. Her interlocutors speak in long, arcing monologues that swoop from the minute banality of personal experience to touch on the great themes of human life and society and back again. “She lends herself as a filter,” as Judith Thurman wrote in a New Yorker Profile, last year. Like “ Transit” and “ Kudos,” the two books that followed it, “Outline” serves as a record not so much of Faye’s own thoughts and actions but of those described to her by the people she encounters. On a brief trip to Greece, Faye, the novel’s protagonist, does very little, and says even less. In 2014, the novelist Rachel Cusk published “ Outline,” the first novel in a trilogy whose style was markedly different from anything that she had previously written.
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