There are episodes of unparalleled weirdness: the story of the dog and the chocolate cake has a kind of disorientating European bizarreness that brings to mind the best of Kundera or Buñuel. So is Ryan, the fellow novelist who, rather than risk committing himself to anything, always says "I might come along later", and who spends pages unburdening himself before adding, as an afterthought: "What about yourself… working on something?" The ageing Greek from the plane, who takes our narrator out on his boat and, with heartsinking predictability, attempts a seduction, is an especially glorious creation. Some individuals crop up more than once, enough for you to begin to relish, or even hope for their reappearance. Outline is a triumph of attitude and daring, a masterclass in tone. It doesn't matter – every single word is earned, precisely tuned, enthralling.
There's no one you can root for or even believe in very strongly, and the novel offers few of the standard expected rewards of fiction.
There's no conventional narrative arc – indeed, there are so many stories-within-stories that you frequently forget who is speaking. Mostly, these people simply unload themselves – marriages, families, failed love affairs – and forget to ask our protagonist very much at all about herself.Īnd, really, that's about it. Though "conversation" is perhaps optimistic. Far less sketchy – in fact punchy and vivid as bright dollops of gouache – are the lives and voices of those around her.īeginning with the billionaire who "talked in his open-necked shirt" while he lunched her at his club before her flight, continuing with the man sitting next to her on the plane (referred to, somewhat comically throughout the novel, simply as "my neighbour"), and moving on through an array of friends, colleagues and students, our narrator engages in a series of conversations which form the substance of the book.
We gather that she's divorced, a mother of two boys, but even these facts are drawn in a kind of indeterminate narrative pencil, as if at any moment they might blur or be rubbed out. Our narrator is a novelist (her personal details are kept so determinedly hazy that it feels almost embarrassing when, late in the book, someone suddenly uses her name) who is flying to Athens to teach a summer writing course.
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