The Associated Press
- Title: Parade
- Author: Rachel Cusk
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: HarperCollins
- Pages: 208
They say everybody loves a parade. But not everyone has been loving Rachel Cusk’s thusly titled new novel, the latest in the stylistic continuum of books that began a decade ago with the Outline trilogy, as well as the brilliantly mordant Second Place.
That critics have dubbed these books “anti-novels” shows how much the term “novel” – which did, and still does mean, “new” – has ossified into a set of expectations involving likeable characters, definable plots and general “relatability.” Cusk doesn’t do that stuff.
But now after years of kudos (the prophetic title of the third Outline book), the novelty of Cusk’s project seems to have abruptly worn off. Especially in Britain, where The Sunday Times compared reading Parade to “walking over shards of broken glass,” adding that it reeked “of self-loathing and self-pity.”
The Telegraph, meanwhile, gave its review the kind of title usually reserved for bombshells about Donald Trump: “Has Rachel Cusk Gone Too Far?” (to which one might reasonably ask “Too far for whom, or what?”).
That reaction might have something to do with the Saskatoon-born writer’s particular brand of novelty, which, admittedly, can feel like having a door – specifically, a freezer door – slammed in your face. In her stripped-down, coolly minimalist approach, Cusk can come across as a fiction-writing Marie Kondo, in which she only keeps a sentence if it sparks detached aloofness.
Parade may not be her best book, but that’s relative, given how high she’s set the bar. Told in a variety of voices – first and third person, and even, at times, in a Greek-chorus “we” – its plotless four sections involve multiple artists, men and women both, all referred to as “G” (there’s a sculptor, filmmaker and at least two painters; absent real names it’s hard to keep track).
Protracted, earnest discussions about art and its meaning feature prominently, giving the book a feeling of airless stasis, even when its characters are in motion. Freedom, violence and gendered power – mostly in the form of husbands oppressing and controlling wives – are recurrent themes. Cusk has had success with these tropes before. What feels uncharacteristic is the occasional lapse into leaden, unintelligible (to me, at least) prose.
Cusk had been excoriated for her earlier memoirs about motherhood and divorce. Written partly in response to all the vitriol, the Outline books featured a largely absent narrator who spent most of her time absorbing the diatribes, and occasionally the malice, of others. It was an aesthetic so bracingly new and clever that, for a time at least, Cusk’s critics retreated into the woodwork.
Like its predecessors, Parade contains overt and sly references to Cusk’s own life and experiences. The narrator of the first section, The Stuntman, for example, is randomly hit over the head on the street by another woman, something that Cusk reported happening to her as well.
But she could just as readily be referring to herself in an alternate narrative of the same section, which deals with a Georg Baselitz-like painter whose career is revitalized when he starts painting upside down:
“His early work had been brutally criticized, and though people assured him that his power to shock was the surest proof of his talent, G had not recovered from these attacks.”
Cusk’s genius has always been anchored in the effortless intelligence of her observations (on full display in her recent book of essays, Coventry). Parade still gives us plenty to admire in that respect, especially in the novel’s strong third section, The Diver, which begins in the aftermath of the titular parade, with municipal workers cleaning streets filled with detritus and broken glass.
After a man kills himself by jumping over a railing at an exhibition of a major female artist, the museum’s director G and a group associated with G gather at a restaurant to decompress.
Speaking about the people who come to her museum, the director notes that while some treat the space as sanctified, like a church, others “take photos with their phones, like voyeurs, and in fact sometimes I think they don’t even see what it is they’re photographing. They’re just making a copy to take away with them, and somewhere in that process they turn what is meant to be eternal into something disposable.”
It’s vintage Cusk. As are the mysterious, strange descriptions of people and landscapes that, combined with the focus on morality, make all her recent novels read like fables.
So, has Rachel Cusk really “gone too far,” or has she just hit a little bit of a dead end? Perhaps the more relevant question is, what will she do next? Will she, like G the painter, absorb the poison and be altered by it? Everything in her resilient 17-book career points to yes.