Rachel Cusk reinvents the novel, again
Parade is a force to be reckoned with
Parade, presented as a novel, might be better described as a manifesto, a philosophical confrontation or even a 198-page op-ed.
From its opening pages, the book delves into startling, emblazoned questions about artistic truth, modern life, death, and gender in all its violence and delicacy. Relentlessly philosophical, linguistically precise and gleefully, categorically disruptive, Cusk has created a novel that warrants deliberative and attentive reading.
Cusk has long been associated with the dismantling of narrative convention, including in her 2014 Outline trilogy, which was courageously driven by cool-headed monologue. Known for her unapologetic intelligence, with Parade, she pushes these experiments further still, and what remains is not so much a story as a kind of existential excavation.
The narrative introduces us to numerous different artists, men and women, all of whom are named “G.” These stories overlap, but never clearly. We are introduced first to a male artist “G,” who paints everything upside down. G’s wife, we learn, “was quietly satisfied, because she herself felt that this reality G had so brilliantly elucidated, identical to its companion reality in every particular but for the complete inversion of its moral force, was the closest thing she knew to the mystery and tragedy of her own sex.” So we are first presented with the running discussion of gender―specifically womanhood, with all its expectations, misfortunes and necessities―that is carried throughout the novel.
We are introduced, in a parallel story, to a female artist “G.” This G believes that “if one were to answer truthfully the question of what a female art might look like, it would have to be composed chiefly of a sort of non-existence.” It becomes clear that Parade is as ready to criticize and satirize, as it is to assert, the often self-reinforced timidity and tribulations of womanhood.
The narrative voice―noticeably monotone, yet fluid and rich with description―is so scopic that it is at first tempting to ask where the unique scores of each character’s voices have gone. The answer is that they were never there; rather, Cusk’s characters, who speak in long, sweeping monologues devoid of quotation marks, are a gallery of characters through which a vividly enacted meditation on life is conveyed via the consciousness of the author.
There is a formalism here, but also honesty, deliberately fashioned. Cusk writes with intellectual ferociousness that takes a moment to settle and a few afternoons to digest. In its exploration, her prose is relentless, witty and at times ugly in its candidness.
In some ways, this is a book of pain: of shame, deaths, losses, delicate alliances, inescapable truths. But each line is also steeped with life, vivacity and description so delightfully fluid that I was struck with the thought that perhaps―this is not just a novel about pain without sentimentality or life without agency, but about the truth at its most bare.
Or maybe, I’m entirely mistaken. When one of Cusk’s characters says, “Not to be understood is effectively to be silenced, but not understanding can in its turn legitimise that silence,” I can only hope that I understand the author as well as I claim to.
“Of all the arts,” says one of Cusk’s “G”s, who writes film reviews under an assumed name, “[writing] was the most resistant to dissociation from the self. A novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone.”
Of Cusk, this is certainly true. With a disorienting, dissective and forceful candour that is unmistakably her own, Cusk’s writing is more comparable to that of Virginia Woolf or Thomas Bernhard than to most modern fiction. This is a novel that asks not to be consumed, but confronted, and I can assure you that it is worth the effort.