What readers think of Outline, plus links to write your own review.

Outline begins when a woman on a plane bound for Athens is prodded into conversation by the man sitting next to her, who narrates the history of his failed marriages. We learn that the never-named woman, a writer, has been invited to teach a creative writing course; her Greek students will all write their short stories in English. Each of the nine subsequent chapters is also told as a conversation, and it's a bit of fun to look for the links between them ("tension" and failed marriages being just two of them). The connections between them indeed fall into the shape of an outline, the kind you made in elementary school, where each main idea cascades into a set of subtopics which, in turn, are broken into their parts. This is a novel where the connections between parts are more significant than the chain of events (which is, in fact, simply the narrator listening to other people's narratives). It's a risky experiment, but Cusk pulls it off quite well.

All of the narrators are a bit self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing, and some are more likable than others. I found most interesting the writing students' descriptions of their stories--all of them based on =memories--written in response to an assignment to write a story with an animal in it. As we watch the visiting author listening to these almost one-sided conversations, we learn much about her as well.

Overall, Outline is a clever, inventive, and finely written novel.