Cusk uses unostentatious but immaculately chosen language to convey graspable ideas about marriage, divorce and personal identity that have no less an impact for being so.

The novel is structured around a series of encounters between a rotating cast of characters.. The dust jacket calls Outline “a novel in ten conversations,” but that feels slightly inaccurate given that Kaye often acts more like a confessor than a participant. In fact, despite narrating in the first person, she reveals virtually nothing about herself. (Cusk has been more voluble about her own life: her eleven books include three memoirs, one of which created a kerfuffle overseas for its unromantic views about motherhood.)..Cusk is Canadian by birth but grew up in the UK, where she still lives (she has the accent to prove it). That’s a technicality, however, that shouldn’t stop us from trying to lay claim to some part of this beautiful, desolate novel.

Rachel Cusk is better known in England than in America; her sharply satirical books about the tolls of family life play better across the Atlantic than here in our often puritanical culture, with its bias towards domesticity..Whereas Cusk's earlier books examined self-definition in the context of marriage and family, her latest ventures outside the home, intriguingly exploring the way people measure themselves in relation to other people's stories. Outline marks an impressive deepening of Cusk's work, and a bold step toward integrating her fiction and nonfiction. There's nothing empty or sketchy about it.

In this respect, Outline belongs to a strain of literature that runs from the Romantics, through Virginia Woolf, to the memoiristic novels of contemporaries such as Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard. It's the hardest kind of fiction to bring off, always running the risk of narcissism and banality, but when it works, it feels paradoxically more miraculous than its artifice-dependent cousins. To my mind Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on to the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller..... I can't say that bothered me, but no doubt it will keep some readers from responding to the book as enthusiastically as I did. It didn't make the Man Booker longlist, for instance. But on the other hand it was serialised in its entirety by the Paris Review, a rare distinction, and a richly deserved tribute to what strikes me as a stellar accomplishment.