Outline

If an innovative novel like Outline can be said to have a second lead, it would be the neighbor. Never named in the book, the neighbor is a Greek man in his sixties whom Faye meets on the plane to Athens. She describes him as having an eccentric appearance with “richly tanned skin”; bushy, silver eyebrows; and a “silver plume of hair” (5). 

The neighbor has a courteous, charming manner of speaking, as his is English formal. To Faye, he describes himself as “having the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek” (7). According to the neighbor, his wealthy family shifted to England when he was a child; subsequently, he and his three brothers were sent to English boarding schools. As an adult, the neighbor built a successful career and has led an itinerant life with homes in London, Athens, and Geneva. He has been married and divorced three times (though he reveals the third divorce to Faye only later) and has at least four children. The first two divorces wrecked him financially, so he has somewhat come down in life. His children are grown, with a daughter working in Silicon Valley, and a son, Takis, staying with the neighbor.

As these details show, the neighbor narrates his life story to Faye at length. This indicates both his volubility and Faye’s interest in him as a listener. However, with each successive meeting, the neighbor’s narrative of his life shifts, as does his performance of himself. On the plane, he appears to Faye as a quasi-fatherly, wise figure. However, at their first meeting in Athens, Faye notes that the neighbor puts on a performance for her, with even the acts of driving, walking through the marina, and preparing the boat to sail having an actorly quality. 

The details of his life story also begin to vary, with Faye unsure of whether his first wife was good or cruel and where exactly he stays in London. These shifts further establish the neighbor as an unreliable narrator of his life story. Further, the neighbor’s views on marriage and women appear biased and often sexist, with him maligning each of his wives. By contrast, he classifies his own infidelity as an oversight or a minor glitch. Though the neighbor may dislike his ex-wives, he has not lost faith in the pursuit of romance, as that offers him a chance to create a new persona, as he is indeed doing with Faye. The neighbor’s most redeeming quality is his tenderness toward his children, particularly Takis. He calls his children the “mainstay” of his life (83).

The neighbor’s attempted seduction of Faye is presented in unpleasant terms, with Faye repulsed by his attempt to hug and kiss her. He does not ask for Faye’s consent before approaching her, though he backs off when she explicitly rejects him. The neighbor’s sure approach toward Faye shows his male privilege and his old-fashioned reading of the relationship between women and men. Since Faye shows an interest in him, he assumes that it is romantic and goes about seducing her. Even after Faye tells him that she is not interested in dating, the neighbor calls her for a final meeting. Since he is stuck in his old patterns, the neighbor is a static character.

Anne is the woman whom Faye meets in the last chapter of the book, and she functions as a double and a foil for Faye’s character. Faye’s first impression of Anne is that of a bird-like woman with a pasty complexion; small, pale-green eyes; and “an unusually long neck and a rather small head, like that of a goose” (227). Anne’s voice is akin to a squawk, and she has odd mannerisms, such as eating spoonfuls of honey straight from the jar. She is dressed in a velvet pants suit that is completely at odds with the hot Athens weather. Thus, everything about Anne suggests agitation and discomfort to Faye. 

Anne is a playwright who has suffered writer’s block since she was violently mugged some time ago. The mugging happened in the throes of an emotional crisis, as her husband had left Anne months before the incident. In Anne’s mind, the abandonment by the husband and the violent attack by the mugger have fused. Apart from the writer’s block, a major consequence of the mugging is that Anne has developed disordered eating. She tells Faye that she has forgotten how to “eat in a normal way” (233). She describes a lunch with her ex-husband in which he ate a four-course meal as she watched hungrily. Later, she went to a bakery and consumed four donuts one after the other.

The narrative underscores the similarities between Anne and Faye. Like Faye, Anne feels uncomfortable with illusions, such as when she mistakes the terracotta statue in Clelia’s apartment for Faye. She, too, lives in England and is divorced. What’s more, like Faye, she encounters a chatty travel partner on the plane to Athens, even referring to him as “neighbor,” Faye’s word for the Greek would-be seducer. After her husband leaves Anne, like Faye, she finds herself unmoored, no longer able to view her sense of self through the lens of marriage. The similarities between the characters illustrate the theme of the changing, amorphous self since Faye and Anne nearly share a personality. 

However, the difference between the two women is illustrated by a key sequence, the one in which Anne speaks to her diplomat neighbor. As Anne talks to the diplomat, she finds that he is very different from her. The more he talks about himself, the more Anne begins to define herself in opposition to him, finding in her nature “a corresponding negative” (238). For the first time in months, she has a sense of herself. Perhaps because of this growing sense of selfhood, Anne offers the diplomat an explanation that he does not like, effectively ending their conversation. Faye, on the other hand, did not undergo such a process with her neighbor. She still thinks of herself as a diffuse consciousness. Anne’s clarity indicates that she is a version of Faye from the future—Faye has yet to find her outline, as Anne did.

Described as a man of conventional blond good looks by Faye, Ryan nevertheless has “something uneasy in his appearance” (34). The unease may be because of her own discomfort with him. Ryan is a fellow writer whom Faye meets during the workshop in Athens. He has many habits that irritate Faye, such as his tendency to always place Faye between himself and the traffic when walking together. Ryan also never commits to plans, affecting an air of nonchalance. When he sits in a café, he always takes the chair with its back to a wall. These mannerisms indicate Ryan’s defensiveness and self-centeredness, as he wants to protect his position at all costs. 

Another aspect that alarms Faye is Ryan’s visible interest in other women, despite being married. Ryan looks at a pretty waitress in a café and calls Faye’s friend Elena so beautiful that she is “another proposition entirely” (179). When Faye questions his habit of looking at other women, Ryan explains that he and his wife allow each other to look at other women and men, respectively, to balance out excess energy in their relationship. Faye dislikes the transactional way in which Ryan talks about his marriage.

Like Faye, Ryan also grapples with the concept of the self. Although he has written a book of stories and is a writing teacher and father of two, Ryan indicates that he feels stuck in life. He cannot go back to writing the same kind of short stories he wrote before since when he reads them, they feel like the work of another person. To break out from his current stasis, Ryan requires tension, a new form that challenges him. Thus, he tells Faye, he might write a thriller. 

Ryan’s description establishes him as an intelligent character who is a tad too aspirational. His belief that he can transform himself by achieving the fittest body is an example of this aspiration. Ryan’s ambition suggests that he will go on to write thrillers and perhaps succeed at them. In fact, when Faye sees Ryan again, in Kudos, the last book of the Outline trilogy (See: Background), he is a successful writer of commercial fiction.

Panitois is an old friend of Faye and is a writer and publisher in his fifties. Faye describes Panitois as distinctive looking, with animated, cartoonish features that seem to be an illustration of his real features. In keeping with the text’s motif of doubles, foils, and opposites (See: Symbols & Motifs), Panitois functions as an antithesis to Ryan’s character in the novel. While Ryan is ambitious and aspirational, Panitois has come to dislike the idea of life and relationships proceeding by “the principle of progress” (99). In fact, Panitois believes that his marriage to Chrysta was defeated because of this principle: When they weren’t making progress, acquiring more things and traveling to more places, they felt defeated. Thus, Panitois and his wife never gave each other room to just be and stay still. When they discovered that they did not love each other, the principle of progress demanded that they do something about the lack of love, and that was divorce, the destructive next step.

Like Faye, Panitois makes a case for going with the flow, without trying to influence the course of reality. Panitois writes about his childhood, an enterprise that comes naturally to him. Panitois’s observations about marriage and life show that he is a wise, thoughtful character. The greatest insight he offers Faye is to consider her past life with her husband as truth instead of illusion. Just because that life has changed does not mean that it did not once exist. Reality and the self are an ongoing composition that should be accepted in their entirety.

Angeliki is a famous feminist writer whom Faye meets through Panitois. When Angeliki parts with Faye after the meeting, she tells Faye that it was lovely to finally get to see her. However, the truth is that Faye and Angeliki have already met previously, at a book reading by Faye. Angeliki’s forgetfulness could be genuine or, as Panitois suggests, a symptom of her newfound fame. Panitois jokes that there are two Angelikis now, though the older, less famous one has been confined to history. Thus, Angeliki’s character reflects how the external forces of wealth and money can change a person.

Faye describes Angeliki as dressed very stylishly, with a flowy dress and silver accents, such as strappy, silver heels; a silver purse; and a silver pen. Her hair is tawny and well cut. However, this appearance of symmetry and elegance is undone by a face that has such an anxious expression that it triggers anxiety within the person looking at Angeliki. Faye’s cutting estimation of Angeliki shows that she is ambiguous about the woman, despite asserting to Panitois that she does like Angeliki. 

Angeliki’s character shows Faye’s own biases and occasional lack of self-awareness as a narrator. Faye’s neutral observations convey what her statements do not. Despite Angeliki’s caricaturized portrayal—she is described as being overly finicky about the restaurant and the food and, like Ryan, too in love with telling her own story—she makes pertinent points about marriage and motherhood. Angeliki describes subsuming herself in her son as an exercise in making herself feel relevant. When she realized that she was using her son to give herself a purpose in life, she began to forge a separate, less co-dependent identity.

The role of Faye’s writing students is to draw attention to the text’s metafictional elements and to examine its themes of storytelling and the process of crafting fiction. In this sense, they act as the chorus in a classical play, returning to spell out the play’s key themes. 

The students appear in two chapters in the novel, and in each, their varied voices ask questions, such as what constitutes a story and an author. For instance, Georgeou, the precocious 15-year-old, considers the role of the writer in an evolving world. If the role of an artist is to record the patterns and sequences of the world, asks Georgeou, perhaps a computer could be programmed to do the same. Penelope, the overwhelmed woman who describes beating her dog, presents the problem of the post-modern, digital-age self. This self is so soaked with information that it has forgotten its own individual subjectivity. Penelope wishes to see the world more innocently again. The conversations between the students also symbolize the act of creativity, with all its free-wheeling associations and jumps.