Parade by Rachel Cusk — artistic reflections that will irk and intrigue

Rachel Cusk is no stranger to provocation. “I annoy everybody,” she once said in an interview. Her memoirs A Life’s Work (2001) and Aftermath (2012) were ahead of the trend of books challenging society’s rose-tinted view of motherhood and marriage. Parade, her 12th novel, continues to divide opinion: The Sunday Times found it like “walking over shards of broken glass”. I, for one, remain in camp Cusk.

From her 1993 debut, Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, Cusk’s early novels were praised for their style. But her divorce and the vitriolic backlash to Aftermath led to what she called a “creative crisis”. Her mode of autobiography had been misunderstood, she felt, yet fiction had become “fake and embarrassing”, Cusk said in 2014.

From the ashes of this artistic death arose a complete revamp of the novel form. Cusk’s widely acclaimed trilogy of novels, Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018), was narrated by a writer whose personality emerges solely in relation to monologues by the interlocutors she encounters — her contours formed by negative space.

Rachel Cusk calls attention to the juxtaposition between the visibility of art and the invisibility of female artists

The Outline trilogy was followed by Second Place (2021), loosely inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, a 1933 memoir by the arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan about hosting DH Lawrence in New Mexico. While its narrator is more audible than that of the trilogy, her frustrated ambitions stand in sharp contrast to the “aura of male freedom” of the egotistical male painter she invites to stay in her guest house.

In Parade, Cusk continues her inquiry of authorship and identity within the visual arts. Organised in four parts, Parade weaves together the stories of various artists, each referred to only by the initial “G”. These are interspersed with first-person observations — sometimes “I”, sometimes “we” — from a narrator that shape-shifts between sections.

In “The Stuntman”, which was published in The New Yorker last year, a male painter begins to paint the world upside down. His wife believes it “inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition”. The paintings described are by Georg Baselitz, an artist who began to represent his subjects inverted in 1969, marrying figuration and abstraction. The story of that G is braided with a narrative about a woman who is attacked in the street by a mentally unstable female assailant, inspired by an incident that happened to Cusk. 

The second part, “The Midwife”, a version of which ran in the FT Magazine last month, features a wild-child female artist married to a controlling man who inspires the same feelings of shame as her parents. He disdains her autobiographical work but enjoys its commercial success. The effects of domineering parents and partners are a recurring motif in Parade: “The sound of his disapproval was that of something longlost but familiar,” recounts one character of her ex-husband.

In “The Diver”, the exhibition of an artist reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois is closed when a viewer jumps from a railing to his death. Cusk calls attention to the juxtaposition between the visibility of art and the invisibility of female artists. The exhibition “was a memorial in thread and cloth, a knitted cathedral,” she writes. “How could the female sex be commemorated in stone? Its basis lies in repetition without permanence.”

“The Spy” features a filmmaker resembling Éric Rohmer who assumes a pseudonym to stay anonymous to his parents. His story is interwoven with that of siblings indifferent to the death of their mother. Other artists are mentioned in passing in Parade, including a late-19th-century painter who died in childbirth at 31, seemingly Paula Modersohn-Becker, and a Black male painter “exhibited after his death alongside that of certain female contemporaries, as though marginality were itself an identity”.

In the essay “Shakespeare’s Sisters”, included in her 2019 collection Coventry, Cusk referred to Virginia Woolf’s exhortation that female writers would need to devise new forms to represent their reality, as even the structure of the sentence was subject to male conventions. Cusk successfully emancipated herself from the constructs inherited from the Victorian novel — including character and plot — with her trilogy. In Parade, the narration continues to favour observation over omniscience — a singularity of perspective no longer possible, she has argued.

Whatever their medium, artists are ultimately trying to make sense of the world. As that world makes increasingly less sense, their task becomes more complicated, and more necessary. The essayistic reflections on the female condition in Parade may irk or intrigue, but as its narrator remarks, “art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word”.

Parade by Rachel Cusk Faber & Faber £16.99, 208 pages

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