Outline recounts ten conversations that the narrator has during a visit to Athens to teach a summer writing course. We learn very little about the narrator herself -- by design, as we learn from the title and from one interlocutor's insight:
I started Outline expecting monologues from a variety of characters, each in their own distinctive voice. However, the narrator describes most of the dialogue in the third person, which gives all the characters an unfortunate sameness.
While he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her... a sense of who she now was.Each chapter feels like a (very successful) writing exercise, with the author conveying ideas in an oblique fashion. Most of the conversations concern relationships between husbands and wives, or rather ex-husbands and ex-wives, and how those relationships affect a person's understanding of life.
I started Outline expecting monologues from a variety of characters, each in their own distinctive voice. However, the narrator describes most of the dialogue in the third person, which gives all the characters an unfortunate sameness.
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