Outline
A novelist flies to Athens to teach a writing course. People talk to her. She listens. That is the plot, and it reinvented what a novel could be. Cusk published Outline in 2014 after declaring her previous autobiographical mode a dead end. The narrator is almost entirely absent; she exists only as the shape left by other people's stories. The first book of a trilogy that changed contemporary literary fiction's sense of what structure is for.
Cusk's strangers on planes, divorcés over dinner, and writing students in Athens all speak in one poised, essayistic voice: hers. The device that erases the narrator quietly colonizes everyone else instead. If the voice enchants you, the book works; if you find it airless, there are two more volumes of it waiting.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
