Parade, Rachel Cusk
Cusk recently said in an interview that the difficulty of approaching a new novel comes from ‘shedding’ any techniques she has previously used before starting afresh. She is ‘willing to be frightened’ by taking a new approach and, with Parade, she subverts narrative form and genre simultaneously, which may have readers experiencing some difficulty navigating the novel.
There is no mistaking that Cusk is a brilliant writer; her prose is searingly sharp, astute and affecting, but some of the most well-observed passages would perhaps sit more comfortably in an essay or nonfiction form. In Parade, Cusk explores the intersection between art, life and identity through a series of vignettes. The book is divided into "The Stuntman", "The Midwife", "The Diver" and "The Spy” – each section exploring the lives of different artists of varied disciplines, all of them named G. This can be puzzling at times, but each re-read in the pursuit of clarity is well worth it.
The first G begins painting upside down, a reflection of his own inverted morality perhaps. Another has her exhibition cancelled after a man throws himself off the gallery building. The chapters read more like biography extracts, where all the characters exist in parallel and overlapping universes. There are recurring themes such as self-expression, motherhood, creativity, and the interplay between isolation and observation, sex and violence. As they try to extract themselves from their work, especially those who are balancing parenthood and creativity, some of the artists become subsumed under theory and abstraction. In these moments, Cusks’ writing is in dialogue with art critics and theorists; lines such as ‘This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness,’ are reminiscent of John Berger or Susan Sontag.
The book has a humming background chorus, where all the characters seem part of an elaborate public production, full of dark familial drama. Even a narrator who is attacked in a Paris street is aware of the spectacle, as she looks back at the ‘square of pavement that was the assassin's studio’ and considers her place within it, as both prop and performer. What makes Cusk a powerful writer is her ability to see beyond preconceived notions of fiction and character to a world beyond binaries, where everything is for interrogation, everything is for art.
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