They’ve been called “raw” and “honest” in an attempt perhaps to suggest that the ideas feel true to experience but in ways that slight the craft and inventiveness of the writer. They’ve been called “quiet,” “cold” and not always derogatorily but in ways that undermine their ability to be heard. The critical landscape has been slow, and sometimes wrong, in its understanding of these books. They defy the novelistic demands for a certain type of resolution they land in spaces of confusion and of questions, refuse to give clear lines between cause and effect. Often they are built in fragments, structured around failure, absences, passivity and lacks. As opposed to the Great Male Novels that centered agency and action, these books are being seen as an expansion of the form, a shaking off of its conventional demands. In particular, novels about a woman thinking, being talked at, are being actively considered. But women’s lives, work and politics are vital to it. The major milestones of feminist history, including ratification of 19th Amendment, are rarely seen on TV. Television Commentary: The fight for women’s rights is a story for the ages. It’s worth considering, though, how one book was built after the other - and how strange that “Outline,” perhaps written with critical reaction in mind, and featuring a narrator who herself does little more than react, broke open a new and surprisingly vital form: the novel of passivity. “Outline” is fiction and “Aftermath” is not. No, not enough, they say, when you hold back. Too much, they say, in other words, when you try to give them all you can conjure.

Review of Books: “Much as the narrator ‘remained dissatisfied by the story’ told on the airplane, I remained dissatisfied by the lack of story told by the narrator about herself.” Maybe it’s an obvious point to make about a 45-year-old serial memoirist, but she finds herself disproportionately fascinating.” And then Magdalena Edwards on the spare, fragmented 2014 novel “Outline” in the L.A. Reading the critical response to Rachel Cusk’s “ Aftermath” alongside the reviews of her “Outline” trilogy feels like following the often-exasperating conversation around “women’s fiction” in real time.įirst, Emma Gilbey Keller on “Aftermath,” Cusk’s 2012 memoir of divorce, in the New York Times: “Cusk often sounds depressed, and appears not so much selfish as self-involved.

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