A novel about a woman writer who flies to Athens to teach creative writing might at first seem like something so tedious and passe as not to merit a second glance.

This could be the point. Even if you looked again, you might be looking for the wrong thing. This woman, our narrator, remains nameless and never emerges as a fully formed character. We learn very little of Athens, although we know we are probably in a Greece already bludgeoned by the financial crisis. For those of us unfortunates who have experienced such courses, the creative writing class is unconventional, to say the least. In fact, the self-negation of the protagonist is a passive-aggressive middle finger raised in the face these career-development tutorials and the writing formulas they espouse.

On the flight, our narrator talks to her "neighbour", a rich Greek who unravels the story of his love life. She turns a critical eye on his tale: "I remained dissatisfied by the story of his second marriage. It had lacked objectivity." Rachel Cusk's writing remains wry and witty throughout. What riles our narrator is her neighbour's disregard for the "eternal equipoise of positive and negative" circumscribed by "reality", of all things. She thinks the truth of the story is "being sacrificed to the narrator's desire to win".

This is more than a meta-fictional joke. The real punchline arrives later. She accompanies her neighbour on a couple of trips on his boat to an idyllic cove. The second time, he makes his move. This is the one point of dramatic tension in the novel. He declares his love for her, but speaks "so momentously" she can only laugh at him. The following description of his desperation to win her, and that of his physical encroachment, is both extremely funny and unsettling: "I felt myself, momentarily, being wrapped around in his greyness and dryness, as though the prehistoric creature were wrapping me in its dry bat-like wings."

The inevitability of this scene makes it all the more humorous. We know our narrator has "come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living life as unmarked by self-will as possible". She can only sit there and hope the creature retreats. Her inert state might have something to do with patriarchy or debt or being a creative writing teacher, or all three.

Nevertheless, there is no point in trying to find out. As for the rest of the action: she meets friends and other writers, and she mostly listens while they talk. Her creative class is set two tasks, which is, thankfully, the extent of her teaching. Again, she simply listens to the students talk. She leaves the room for a while. Her mortgage adviser tells her she cannot have another loan. Her heart beats a little faster.

The style of the conversations, which are more like a series of monologues, is sometimes quite bizarre. One can never tell why we move from reported speech to indirect discourse - speech bypassed through the narrator's perspective. After all, whichever stylistic device is used there is never a change in tone or a different use of language. The novel is mostly composed of voices that are not the narrator's own, yet every one sounds like her. The stories her acquaintances tell, whether they are students or not, are sometimes banal, sometimes funny, sometimes pretentious. Most importantly they contain the component parts we expect from conventional fiction: love, loss, despair, redemption, happiness. They are all here if you want them, our narrator seems to say.

The plot, or what there is of it, is recursive. There is not really anything to give away, but the end is deftly done. The character who comes in to replace our narrator as teacher worships Samuel Beckett, her "god". Unsurprisingly, her life and writing are slowly being reduced to single words, like "tension" or "jealousy", and finally "meaninglessness".

It is now that we understand Outline, which has been serialised in its entirety in the Paris Review, could be an attack on how formulaic the novel becomes when given too many strictures. In its absent core perhaps it is about - horrible phrase - "creative writing" after all. It seems apposite to end at the beginning then: what at first seems like something tedious and passe is actually rather good.