Hannah Tennant-Moore
How much less violence we would do to our lives, Rachel Cusk’s eighth novel suggests, if we could bear disenchantment. Outline is composed mainly of conversations between the narrator, Faye, and the people she meets in Athens, where she’s teaching a summer writing course. Through the stories told to Faye by strangers, acquaintances, and friends, Cusk illustrates how the “principle of progress” causes people to destroy what they have in their search for the next thing. One man attributes the end of his marriage to him and his wife’s running out of mutual goals to accomplish (house, children, travel): “If In “Self Portrait with Cheese,” a story from Frederic Tuten’s new collection, the narrator tries to give bears a seminar in the “history of humankind.” But the bears, freshly escaped from the circus, soon grow bored of both his teachings and their newfound life of ease. They resolve to return to the circus, but to perform only in the manner of their choosing.