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I grabbed this book solely on the back of a tweet from Joss Whedon but it then languished in my TBR pile for months. With the book finally being released in Australia I thought it was time to pick it up and was immediately sucked in. Catherine Lacey’s writing style is electrifying. She skillfully balances […]

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Chloe Aridjis, Jenny Offill, Samantha Harvey, Catherine Lacey, Rachel Cusk: Lately I've been reading authors like these, women unafraid of breaking form or muddying expectations, women writing sentences that scour. They are books in which the characters choose, in some way, to be alone—to isolate themselves inside their own thoughts, to sever themselves from social conventions, to tell stories that, without resort to war or torture, somehow carry knives.

This morning I finished reading Outline, Rachel Cusk's story of—well—what is it, exactly? It is the story of a writer who has gone to Greece for a week to teach; yes, it is that, at one level. But mostly it is about a woman who moves through the world under the assault of other people's stories. People who find themselves, in her presence, talking through the cyclone of their own lives, presenting themselves as they wish to be presented, asserting their right (right?) to be heard, smudging and aggrandizing, begging to be understood, until, ultimately, their stories devolve into self-circling harangues. The people our narrator meets, the people who natter on, hardly need to be encouraged. Given room to talk, they do, exhibiting, ultimately, that something selfish, stingy, mean of propulsive monologue. We have all been on the other side of such a thing. We understand. There is almost a comedy to it.

But Cusk is after far more than a set piece, a commentary on rampant self-absorption. Cusk ratchets the ambush of monologue to high tension in Outline. She makes, of these disconnected interludes, a story with an arc. She uses her scheme to explore essential questions about the lies we tell ourselves, the responsibilities we negate, the desire we have to blame other people for the unhappiness we feel or the success we have not had or the mess we have made of marriages or parenting. Her narrator is a woman who "did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything." She is a woman rarely asked about herself, but when she does comment on the stories she is told, she brings an outsiderly wisdom, a pausing perhaps. We know the outlines of who she is (a writer, a divorcee), in other words, but far more important is how we come to know what she thinks.

Here, for example, she is responding to an insufferable woman's complaints about marriage:

I replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a 'real' self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn't actually exist. My mother once admitted, I said, that she used to be desperate for us to leave the house for school, but that once we'd gone she had no idea what to do with herself and wished that we would come back.

Here the narrator muses on desire:

I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying—it seemed to me—was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become—to put it bluntly—anathema to me. There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that, I had decided to want nothing at all.

A rosy world view this is not. Easy entertainment—it's not that, either. But it is fierce and different and part of a new world order in fiction written by women. A movement to which I think we must pay quite close attention.

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I don't always agree with the conclusions New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner draws, but I am perpetually eager for his missives. He digs in deep. He reads and writes on full throttle. He doesn't look back over his shoulder. Garner's recent review of Catherine Lacey's debut novel Nobody is Ever Missing is the reason I bought the book. Lacey's spellbinding talent is the reason I read it through in a single rainy afternoon.

The novel is a no holds barred, desperate unwinding of a woman, Elyria, who leaves her life behind and tells no one where she's going. She has a one-way airline ticket to New Zealand. She has a husband, a mother, a sister who is no longer alive, a job, the trappings of an ordinary life. Trappings. That's the word. She's fleeing the trappings of her life.

She gets off the plane. She has the vaguest of plans. She wants to be alone, leave her alone, leave her to her thoughts, watch as her thoughts unwind, as she does, as she questions everything in sentences and paragraphs that go long across the page. She doesn't wish to be with people, only near them. She doesn't tell her story, doesn't even know her story, addresses her Husband, with whom, in time, over the long-distance wire, on more than one paralyzing occasion, she will briefly speak. The depth of his outrage becomes the novel's deepest silence.

One thing happens, another thing happens, Elly is a young woman taking chances, a human being increasingly alone. She was the original abandon-er. Now the world is abandoning her. She keeps trying to put a stake in the ground. She gives up on Time.

... everyone walks around thinking nothing is going to happen right up to the moment when something does happen, just like time, how it's here one minute and we don't notice it till it's gone—no, it's not like that, I would tell the tree branches if I was the type of person who talked to tree branches or imagined a monologue for a tree's branches—no, time is a thing that is always almost a thing that is never here and never gone and never yours and never anyone's and we're all trying to get a hand clutched tight around time and no one will, so why can't we call a truce, now, Time? I am not asking, I am just saying—I'm calling a truce with time. Truce.

Yes, sure, not everyone will seek out a book that unwinds and unwinds and unwinds and carries itself forward on rafts of blistering thought and sudden violence and utter lonesomeness. Not everyone. But, Lord. Let's make room for Catherine Lacey and her ferocious determination to see this story through, to not rescue it for the Hollywood ending, to take Alone to its final restless resting place. Let's make room for this young novelist, who can do just about anything with words.

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