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 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal cruelty and death and disordered eating.
The last assignment that Faye gives her class is a story featuring animals. Many of them have not completed it since Christos, the politically minded young man, invited them dancing the previous night. The students describe the evening’s events, as well as their attempts to write the story, as Christos laughs at their observations.
Christos himself describes how he wanted to bring an animal into his current preoccupation: a debate between two orthodox bishops. As he attempted to write a story bringing together these disparate strands, his mother kept interrupting him. She wanted him to clean his room because important relatives were arriving soon. This was a branch of their family who had emigrated to the United States and frequently boasted of their successful lifestyle via mail and pictures. One of the photos they’d sent was of Christos’s handsome, muscular cousin Nicky with a boa constrictor wrapped around him. Christos felt emasculated by the image. Since he wanted to make up for the disappointment, he stopped writing and cleaned his room. In the end, Nicky and the boa proved inspiring, as Christos finished his story of the bishops on the bus, with the snake featuring as a symbol of hypocrisy and lies.
Clio, who had been moved by the music, did not write a story but paid attention to birds and their music all throughout the week. She was reminded of the work of the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who had been a prisoner of war during World War II. Messiaen had based some of his pieces on the birdsong he had heard in detention. Georgeou, the 15-year-old, thinks that this shows that the role of an artist is to record sequences; a computer can be programmed to do the same. His own story is about a conversation he had with his aunt about particle mutations. Georgeou added a lizard to this story.
Sylvia did not write anything. She tells Faye that she wishes that she had observed the white dog more or started a conversation with the man holding the dog. She looked for the pair on the subway again but could not find them. Sylvia teaches English literature at a school and lives with her mother. Her mother wants her to stop thinking about books and go outside and live. Sylvia goes on to describe how she had sought inspiration for Faye’s assignment in a book of short stories by D. H. Lawrence, one of her favorite writers. Just then, Faye’s phone rings. It is Lydia, the woman at the mortgage company. Lydia calls Faye by her name, the first time Faye’s name is spoken in the novel. Faye goes out to talk; Lydia gives her the bad news that her loan extension has been rejected.
Faye returns to a story from Penelope. Penelope’s story was inspired by a visit from her neighbor showing off a puppy from his dog’s litter. The neighbor, Stravos, wanted Penelope to adopt the puppy. Her children swooned over the little creature. Though Penelope found the puppy adorable, she declined adopting him because it would be too much work for her. Her children were miffed with her. Their anger reminded Penelope of a terrible time in her life.
A few years ago, her children made her get a dog, whom the family named Mimi. Mimi was beautiful and cuddly, but as she grew, all the tasks around walking and feeding her fell to Penelope, who was already overworked. On top of that, Mimi had the bad habit of lunging at food, which meant that she could not be left off the leash. Penelope grew resentful of Mimi. One day, Mimi ate a birthday cake while Penelope was distracted. Penelope beat up Mimi in anger. The dog ran away and was never found. Penelope has written a story about Mimi.
Marielle, the beautiful, extravagantly dressed woman, talks about dogs as well. She bought her son a puppy, which was run over. Ever since then, her son has not been the same person. The death of the puppy made her son a cold man. Marielle prefers cats and is happy that her husband left her their felines. Since he left the cats, the husband feels that his luck has lessened, whereas Marielle keeps finding the most amazing artifacts, such as a priceless bracelet in a flea market. Her cats are very clever and have forced her lover to become more organized. Since they were so cold to him when he cluttered the house with his books, the lover has learned to put them away.
Aris, the boy who described the putrefying dog, says that humans use animals as reflections of their own consciousness and also feels that animals exert a moral force on them. Aris’s story is about a hamster he loved and therefore let out of its cage. Faye thanks the class for their stories. Rosa gives her a box of almond cupcakes to pass around. Faye takes home the extra cupcake, meant for Cassandra, who did not show up.
Chapter 10 Summary
It is Faye’s last day in Athens. She wakes up at seven o’clock in the morning to find the apartment’s next occupant, a thin, nervous-looking woman, already in the living room. The woman apologizes for her early arrival. She is eating from the honey jar, as if famished. Faye makes coffee for the woman, whose name is Anne, and offers her Rosa’s cupcake. Anne is a playwright who has flown in from Manchester, where she was teaching another course. Anne tells Faye that she has been suffering from terrible writer’s block since a traumatic incident and mostly makes her money through teaching. The incident was a mugging in which she was nearly killed.
After the mugging, she lost her ability to eat normally and is perpetually hungry. She cannot write since the event because she thinks that a single word, rather than a complicated plot, can sum up any work of literature. When Faye asks Anne to describe the mugging, she is taken aback. She briefly describes a man jumping out of a bush and trying to strangle her. She stops, telling Faye that talking about the mugging is retraumatizing.
Anne describes her flight from Manchester to Athens. She chatted with the man next to her, a diplomat who knew many languages. The more the diplomat spoke about his experience of traveling and learning new languages, the more Anne saw herself as an antithesis of him. In outlining his own life, the diplomat was creating a negative outline of hers. When the diplomat told Anne that the only language he had difficulty learning was Greek, Anne wondered if it was because his wife and children had not accompanied him to Greece. The diplomat rejected the explanation, saying that the only reason he did not learn Greek was because it was an unimportant language. His statement had a finality that ended his conversation with Anne.
Talking about adapting to new languages reminded Anne of her marriage to her ex-husband, a chef. Just like the diplomat had to adapt to a new reality when he learned a language, Anne had to evolve a new self after her husband divorced her. She also had to become a new person after her mugging. The mugging and her husband’s abandonment have become sequential in Anne’s mind: One man abandoned her so that another could attack her.
Anne asks Faye about the places she can visit in Athens. Faye suggests that she go to the Agora, with its statues of headless goddesses. The place has been invaded and rebuilt many times and is now preserved, which gives it a certain aura.
Faye’s phone rings. It is the neighbor from the plane wondering if Faye would like to come for a swim before her flight that day. Faye politely declines. The man tells her that he will spend his day in “solicitude.” Faye wonders if he means “solitude,” and he apologizes—“solitude” is the right word.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
The final section of the novel constitutes an end in the sense that it wraps up Faye’s week-long trip to Athens. However, in the conventional narrative sense, the novel is open-ended since there has been no definite denouement. This suggests that Faye’s journey as a character wrestling with The Difficulty of Defining the Self is still continuing and will unfold in Transit, the sequel to Outline, in which Faye begins to rebuild her life in London (See: Background).
Faye’s last class with her students brings together The Roles of Storyteller and Listener in Shaping Narratives, featuring the text’s animal imagery. Since the last story has to feature an animal, the discussion includes the role of animals in human literature and art. Aris notes that animals exist as vessels in which humans project their feelings; animals lend themselves to this representation since they cannot speak. Aris’s statement coincides with the self that Faye is trying to achieve—a quiet self that observes and records the thoughts and feelings of others. However, just like the definition of the self is changeable, so is the representation of animals in the various stories. In Penelope’s story, the dog is not a symbol of anything; it is simply a dog that gets beaten by an overwhelmed woman. Georgeou adds a lizard to his story simply to give it a twist. Thus, just like the animals in the stories of the students, the self also evades definition.
The device of Faye’s interrupting phone returns, this time with the loan agent naming her. Thus, the call from the loan agent represents Faye’s real life calling her back, fixing her with her name. Faye can no longer be an amorphous “I”; she has to return to rebuild her life. Anne’s introduction in the final chapter also amplifies the motif of doubles and repetitions (See: Symbols & Motifs). Anne herself is a version of Faye, as she will replace Faye not just in Clelia’s apartment but also in the writing workshop. Even their names—each spelled with four letters—match each other in symmetry.
Though Faye never describes her own physical appearance, Anne is presented as a wavering, fading presence. Her face is the color of whey, and she is skinny. Anne describes losing a quarter of her body weight in the last year. Just as Faye is trying to efface herself in consciousness, Anne’s trauma may be weakening her body. Both Faye and Anne have been affected by men: Faye through her divorce and Anne through her ex-husband and the violent mugging. The parallels between Faye and Anne imply that the individual consciousness is as universal as it is singular.
Another parallel between Faye and Anne is Anne’s reaction to the terracotta woman in the apartment. Just as Faye feels uncomfortable with the illusion in the café window, Anne feels discomfited by the lifelike image of the woman, whom Anne mistook for Faye. This invokes the novel’s interest in illusion versus reality: Illusions bother people in the novel the most when they find their reality lacking in comparison. Anne dislikes the terracotta woman because her solidity and grandeur remind Anne of her own current troubled state.
However, the text does not present Anne as just Faye’s mirror, as Anne is also different from Faye in many ways. The difference between Anne and Faye is most obvious through the story of Anne’s plane journey. Anne, too, strikes up a conversation with her neighbor on the flight to Athens, and like Angeliki’s husband, he is a diplomat. As the man tells her stories, Anne begins to define herself in opposition to his narrative: She is what he is not. Through this process, she creates an outline of herself. The outline is just a shape, but it is the first solid idea of herself that Anne has created after the mugging. Faye, by contrast, has not yet found the outline that she must fill.
Through the involved, intense conversation between Faye and Anne, the neighbor’s text pops up. Faye finally responds, and she and the neighbor experience a comical misunderstanding over a word. The neighbor says that he will spend his day in “solicitude,” which means in care or in company, implying that he will not be alone. Faye reminds him that the word he means is “solitude” since she will not be able to join him. The distance between “solicitude” and “solitude” becomes a metaphor for the distance between language and understanding, self and definition, reality and illusion, and women and men, thus concluding the novel.
