62 pages • 2 hours read
Rachel CuskOutline
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
That evening, Faye meets an old friend, Panitois, at a restaurant in the middle of the town. Panitois has told her that Angeliki, a successful novelist, may join them. Faye gets to the restaurant first. When Panitois arrives, he tells Faye that Angeliki is bound to hate the restaurant, as it is not fashionable enough. Panitois’s choice of restaurant was deliberate since he is sure not to run into anyone else there. Lately, he has lost all interest in socializing.
Panitois recalls the last time he met Faye, which was in England three years ago. Faye had been accompanied by her husband and children. Panitois had left the lunch feeling like a failure since Faye’s life seemed so happy and complete in comparison. To capture the image of perfection, Panitois had asked to take a picture of Faye with her family. He has brought the picture with him today to show Faye. Faye replies that she remembers Panitois asking for the photo, but she feels sad that she made him feel like he had failed. Perhaps she had behaved insensitively at that lunch, which is why she was punished with her painful divorce. Panitois reassures her that none of this is true.
Panitois’s own marriage ended as well since both he and his wife saw each other as opportunities to notch up accomplishments, whether it be houses, new places to travel, and even children. Ultimately, they wore each other out with their demands. The publishing house that Panitois founded was bought by a larger corporation, and he now works as a company editor in it. Panitois’s vision for the publishing house was to print little-known but great English authors. However, this meant that he couldn’t pay his writers. The writers grew upset and abandoned him, the publishing company lost its way, and Panitois was forced to sell it. Ironically, those writers are rejected by the larger publishing house, continuing a vicious cycle. The only thing that makes Panitois happy is writing about his childhood—a perfect, whole time—which is why he is writing a novel on it.
Panitois fills Faye in about Angeliki. She has acquired airs, as her novel won a literary prize in Europe. Angeliki projects herself, and is also considered, as a voice for womanhood since her novel is about a painter who feels stifled by her husband. The husband, a diplomat, expects the painter to uproot her life and move with him, and the woman begins to lose respect for her own work. She ultimately strikes up a romance with a younger man. Angeliki arrives, dressed stylishly, though Faye notices that she has a very anxious face. As Panitois predicted, she dislikes the restaurant and has several discussions with him and the waitstaff in Greek, presumably about the arrangements and her specific dietary requirements.
Angeliki apologizes for making Faye and Panitois wait. She has just returned from a book tour in Poland. It is only recently that Angeliki and her family have started to travel for her work. Earlier, they used to follow her husband, who is a diplomat. Sometimes, Angeliki has to travel independently, as she did in Poland, which makes her nervous. This is partly because when she is alone, even familiar cities seem different than they did to her married self. Faye replies that when one is married, it is difficult to separate “what you were from what you had become through the other person” (104). Angeliki is so impressed by what Faye said that she asks her to repeat it slowly as Angeliki writes it down.
Panitois and Angeliki each tell Faye a story about parenthood. Angeliki used to be an obsessive mother to her son, viewing him as singularly delicate and fragile. The illusion that she needed to devote herself to him shattered after she fell ill in Athens, shortly after her husband’s job moved to Berlin. Angeliki was not involved in her household for about six months, and during that time, her husband and son became self-sufficient. When Angeliki recovered, she realized that she had fussed so much over her son to give herself a sense of importance. In the process, she had become the parasitical mother and wife that the feminist Simone de Beauvoir talks about.
Her illness, meanwhile, had been brought about by her time in Berlin, where she was surrounded by hyper-efficient women with large families. These mothers managed the schedules of their five or six children without blinking, often changing into white sneakers to run errands. When she came back to Athens, Angeliki felt swamped by the exhaustion that the Berlin mothers had never expressed. She developed a fondness for delicate, impractical footwear in reaction to the efficient white sneakers of the women. In her novel, the artist also prefers footwear that forces her to not move around too much.
Panitois recalls his first solo trip with his children, post-divorce. He took them to a tourist spot in the hills north of Athens. Panitois was uncomfortable, wishing that he could be home. However, he noticed that the children did not feel the same way; since they were with their father, they already felt like they were home. This knowledge further saddened Panitois since it made his single parenthood feel more real. They stopped mid-trip at a hotel, which was terrible and filled with mosquitoes. The squalor of the hotel made Panitois pity himself and his children; it was almost as if they were all now destined for ugliness.
The following day was bad as well, involving a mad search for a pharmacy for the children’s several mosquito bites. Panitois somehow ended up in a beautiful mountain inn filled with French girl scouts. The girls seemed at home with the landscape and made Panitois feel like he, too, should accept his current life with peace. From then on, the trip changed, and his daughter still remembers it, though in her mind, it has no special significance.
The restaurant shuts down, and Angeliki leaves, saying goodbye. Panitois walks Faye to her apartment. He tells Faye that Angeliki is angry with him since she has been omitted from an anthology he is editing. Faye tells Panitois that she likes Angeliki. As Panitois parts from her, he gives her the photo he took of her family. He asks Faye never to shy away from the photo since it is part of her truth.
Chapter 6 Summary
Faye is teaching a writing class. Ryan has already told her about the student cohort, which has an equal number of men and women. The students discuss whether they should open the windows. No one can figure out how to turn down the chilly air conditioning, but the open windows will let in too much heat. Ultimately, they decide to keep the windows open and the door closed. Faye draws a square on a paper, with the names of the 10 students arranged around the square. She asks each student to describe something interesting that they noticed on their way to class.
The first to go is a young woman called Sylvia. Sylvia describes a tall, dark man holding a white, fluffy dog on a train platform. Theo, a man in a pin-striped suit, follows with a performative story about spotting an expensive women’s handbag left on a wall. Theo stopped on his way to the metro to look at the open bag and saw that it still had a wallet and keys inside. He waited for someone to come claim the bag but left after a while. It was only afterward that he realized he should have taken it to the police station. Theo pauses here, as if his story has ended. Just as the others ask him more about the bag, Theo resumes his story. He did turn around to take the bag to the police. Just then. he saw a cop walk toward the bag, examine its contents just as Theo had done, and take it away, presumably to the station. The class applauds Theo’s story.
Clio describes passing by a music college on her way to class, with a piece of piano music floating out through the window. The piece was one of her favorites, the D Minor fugue from Bach’s French Suites. Hearing the music made her feel inexplicably sad, as if a bit of music that was hers now belongs to the person who played it. She wonders what the music would have meant to another passer-by. Someone watching her would never have ascribed the same meaning to the experience as she did; they would just have seen a girl walking along and heard the piano being played. Georgeou, the 15-year-old boy seated next to her, responds that this version is in fact true. Clio’s experience was just a matter of probability; given the number of people who pass the music college, someone was bound to get affected by a piece.
At the mention of music, Marielle, a beautiful woman in her fifties wearing lots of blue eye make-up and gold jewelry, describes in an elaborate manner how music made her realize that her husband was cheating on her. Her husband was singing a song from Carmen, the opera about seduction and betrayal, in the shower, which made Marielle immediately understand that he was subconsciously singing the theme of his life. This morning, Marielle went to her husband’s office before coming to class and noticed that he had redecorated it completely. Even his old assistant was missing, replaced by a petite, pale-skinned girl dressed in all white. The girl’s hair was dyed white as well, save a single strand of blue. After Marielle falls silent, 24-year-old Christos describes walking through an alleyway where he and his friends held political demonstrations last year. He spotted ruins of a building that was burnt in the protests and felt a sense of guilt.
As Christos digresses into his falling-in with a political crowd at the university, Faye’s phone rings. It is her younger son, who tells Faye that he is lost on his way to school. Faye takes the call outside, staying on the phone with her son until he finds the school building. When she returns, Christos’s story has ended, and a girl is eating a savory pastry. The girl catches Faye’s eye and apologetically narrates the simple thing she noticed on her way to class. It was a swing at a childhood playground where she’d spent many pleasant hours with her grandmother. The swing made her recall those times. Aris describes the body of a dog he spotted, putrefying and covered with flies. The creepy buzzing of the flies had a musical quality.
The last description is by 43-year-old Penelope, who feels that her mind is so crammed with the stories, expectations, and memories of others that she cannot tell which things affect her personally. For instance, early this morning, her sister called to tell her a story about their friends’ remodeled kitchen. The kitchen’s much-admired centerpiece was an enormous sunken glass panel in the ceiling. However, the friends noticed a small crack in the panel one evening. They decided to look into it later since they had people coming over for dinner. That night, a storm descended, and the entire panel collapsed under the weight of water on the guests. This third-hand memory has stuck with Penelope, even though it is not something that happened to her. She wishes that there were a way for her to experience life afresh again.
Everyone in the class has spoken, with the exception of a woman called Cassandra. When Faye asks her to participate in the exercise, the woman tells her that she is very disappointed with the quality of Faye’s teaching. She had thought that Faye would actually teach them how to use their imagination and write. Cassandra calls the workshop a waste of time and money and tells her that she will be giving the organizers negative feedback about Faye.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Chapters 5 and 6 introduce several new characters, such as Panitois, Angeliki, and the students of the writing class, invoking The Roles of Storyteller and Listener in Shaping Narratives. Each character tells their story, in a narrative style reminiscent of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. The throwback to these medieval works shows how Cusk uses unusual narrative conventions to further her plot: Here, she deploys the episodic story structure and story-within-a-story format of the medieval works to tell a tale that is decidedly postmodern. The build-up of voices in this section mimics the role of a chorus in an opera or a work of classical drama, with the chorus reinforcing the themes of the plot.
The conversations among Faye and her friends and students emphasize the metafictional quality of the novel, with these conversations drawing attention to its own narrative processes and structures. For instance, Angeliki stops Faye mid-conversation to pull out a pen and notepad so that she can note down the words Faye is repeating. Since Outline itself is considered a work of autofiction (See: Background), Angeliki’s action is a comment on how writers mine their real-life interactions for material. However, even though writers may base their novels on their own lives, the details are often transmuted. Thus, the protagonist of Angeliki’s novel—though clearly based on herself—is a painter, rather than a writer. Similarly, even though Faye is said to be based on Cusk herself, the character has sons, while Cusk has daughters. This shows that even autofiction cannot be read as autobiography: Narratives are always different from the literal truth.
Faye’s interactions often feature humor and irony to gently satirize human nature and contemporary culture. For instance, Panitois tells Faye that having written one novel with feminist themes, Angeliki considers herself the spokeswoman for all women. When Angeliki arrives, her words reinforce Panitois’s impression, with Angeliki holding forth on the women she met during her travels and the role of wives and mothers in society. The irony is that it is clear that Angeliki, who is dressed in expensive clothes and looks down upon Panitois’s unfashionable choice of restaurant, does not represent all women since she is highly privileged, being a successful writer and a diplomat’s wife. Angeliki’s description shows how Faye manages to convey her wry humor, opinions, and satire despite a straight-faced tone. This also shows that no matter how much the narrator or storyteller might try to hide, the story catches them out: In this case, the subtle criticism of Angeliki illustrates Faye’s disapproval of Angeliki’s hypocrisy.
Panitois’s act of taking a photo of Faye and her family once more speaks to the idea of illusion versus reality and The Difficulty of Defining the Self. Just as Faye felt her own life lacking in comparison with the sight of the happy family on the boat, Panitois felt like a failure when he saw Faye with her husband and children. The truth is that the happy family was a mirage since Faye divorced soon after. Thus, the narrative shows how people often confuse an instant in time, a snapshot, for a complex truth. The fact that Panitois urges Faye to keep the photo, saying, “[I]t remains your truth” (130), suggests that truth is a composite and a collage, rather than an unalloyed whole.
Faye’s interactions with the students also challenge conventional perceptions of a piece of writing. Faye asks her students to describe something that they observed on their way to class. Some take this as an opportunity to put on a performance, such as Theo, who relates an elaborate tale about an abandoned handbag. The story stretches the limits of credulity since it is a stretch that something so precise happened to Theo on the very morning he’d be asked to recap his morning. Others question the very role of subjectivity.
For instance, Penelope notes that she is not sure any more of which story is hers to tell since her mind is crowded by the voices and impressions of others. Penelope represents the postmodern consciousness, flooded with so much stimulus that it loses interior focus. Many of the stories, such as those of Penelope and Marielle, draw attention to the roles of wives and mothers, suggesting that such roles play an important part in developing or distorting their sense of self. Marielle describes discovering her husband’s infidelity, while Penelope wants to get away from everything so that she can know her own mind.
Women and parents in the text often exhibit a desire to get away from their conventional roles. Angeliki felt stifled in her life as a diplomat’s wife and her role as an overanxious mother. Faye, too, has come to Athens as a temporary escape from real life. Nevertheless, the motif of children keeps cropping up (See: Symbols & Motifs), drawing the women back to their daily reality. In the middle of the writing class, Faye’s son calls her. She goes outside to take his call, guiding him over the phone to his school. The sequence is a tragicomic commentary on motherhood and its demands.
Cassandra’s dislike of Faye’s class raises the question of what comprises writing. While Faye wants to approach writing and storytelling as an act of observation, Cassandra wants to write in a way that “involve[s] using your imagination” (157). For Cassandra, the freewheeling discussion of Faye’s class is a waste of time and money. Faye’s description of Cassandra’s body language, growing sourer by the minute, is a satirical take on the indignant customer who feels conned of their money. At the same time, the unflattering representation also prompts the question of whether Cassandra is indeed so terrible or if Faye’s narration makes her out to be so.
Cusk’s writing in this section, and throughout the novel, is filled with literary devices, allusions, and detailed descriptions. For example, she uses a simile to establish Panitois’s striking face, his “eyebrows winging off like exclamation marks” (92). The writer pays particular attention to describing objects and settings, with Faye’s sense of self seeping even into her landscape, dissolving the boundaries between her and the world. She thus describes the square outside the classroom: “The hot spaces were already deserted at ten o’clock in the morning. Pigeons advanced in their circling, tatty formations across the paving slabs with their heads down, pecking” (132). Here, the repetitive movements of the pigeons and their bent heads reflect Faye’s own shuttered attention.
