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Rachel Cusk’s Struggle to Break Free | The Nation

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In her Outline trilogy, the English novelist finds a freedom in art that she cannot locate in life.

September 27, 2018 This article appears in the October 22, 2018 issue . Illustration by Joe Ciardiello. K udos , the final book in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, ends with a confrontation between a man and a woman on a beach. Both are naked. The woman is swimming; the man, “resplendent and grinning,” is peeing in the water just behind her. Cusk’s writing in this scene approaches the mythic: The man’s urine is “like a gold rope he was casting into the sea”; the sea itself, she adds, is like “some sighing creature.” We are in an Eden beset by evil, a world in which women and men are locked in an

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