Note: My review of Lamorna Ash’s Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever for the Cracks in Postmodernity Substack
Parade. By Rachel Cusk. New York: Picador, 2025. 208 pp. $18.00.
After our trauma was met with silence, our lives were to be seen only in terms of pity and abjection. Violence was the key, the aberrant form that instantiated the fullness which we could never hope to achieve, but a recognition of this would have been inadmissible for those of us committed to this dream of wholeness.
These are not actually sentences from Rachel Cusk’s Parade, but they give you the non-flavor of the novel. They could be substituted here or there for hers without really changing anything. This pseudo-academic, pseudo-technical language, not derived from a single field, is most pervasive in the art world, which Cusk has lately chosen as her setting. Cusk had written satires and memoirs before beginning her acclaimed Outline trilogy, whose narrator is a version of her, a writer who roves around Europe. Her last novel was a halfway point between the literary and art worlds: it used a memoir about D.H. Lawrence’s stay in New Mexico as the basis for a story about a famous painter staying at the narrator’s house in rural England. Now, in Parade, her subjects are a series of artists, all of them named “G”, including painters, a sculptor, and a filmmaker, from various times and places. What they share are the motif of dying parents, and of decisions about children and marriage, and also contact, direct and indirect, with a nameless narrator who is sometimes an “I” and sometimes part of a “we”. Cusk dares to assemble “a novel” without a central story, consisting mostly of musing about art, marriage, and parenthood. Some critics have detected arguments developing across the four chapters, as well they might since the last chapter, “The Spy” was originally published as an essay in Harper’s Magazine, while others have rejected Parade as a failed experiment, an “anti-novel” that neither entertains nor enlightens. Most, however, seem fairly impressed by the quality of the writing itself, as if impressed by the collegiate conceptualism, and this is very strange given some of the things we actually find in the book.
Parade, it turns out, is confused, full of waffling, and uneven in tone. The program language, as dull as it is, keeps Cusk mostly safe, however finicky: “It was through her complicity that the terms of G’s own exclusion from the image were constituted.” But when she strays from it, as narrative requires her to, there is trouble. Here she helpfully reminds us why high school teachers advise against passive voice: “Walking through the city in the fierce fresh sunlight, the element of freedom in our rootlessness could intermittently be felt.” Elsewhere, we find an attempted metaphor that lapses and becomes abstract: “Like the figurehead on the prow of a boat, G had received the first impact of their natures, to which the momentum of youth imparted a continuous quality of violence.” Here is another doomed effort at figuration that as it happens almost accidentally describes the muddle of Parade’s style: “increasingly nameless shapes drifted with a hulking, unbroachable violence.” A hulking, unbroachable violence? As in Joseph Conrad, the thunderstroke of signification is a camp sound effect. Even early in the novel Cusk is already writing as if in parody of her own portentousness, then turning gothic: “G heard in that accent the problem of history itself, as it insidiously bequeathed its dark inheritance to each unsuspecting new generation.” That gothic suggestion, which one finds elsewhere in a “dark twin” and the silhouette of a bad husband in a bedroom doorway, could have been developed to make for a more entertaining novel at least, but Cusk, somehow, has a reputation for clinical, clear-eyed judgement to maintain, so it is dropped.
Eventually, we find the explanation we could have guessed upon. The third chapter, “The Diver”, is a conversation at a restaurant between art world professionals, from which the narrator recedes, apparently not saying anything. It is more like something from the Outline trilogy, and a welcome change as it begins here, but unfortunately it doesn’t give us a proper reprieve from the stilted, humorless narrator’s voice. A woman named Betsy is somewhat livelier, but the others are on about the “embodiment of the will” or how they can’t imagine having children, i.e. inviting “something into your life that will directly and intimately sabotage your capacity to work”. Parade might reject story, and the moral thereof, but it is a cautionary tale: you learn from reading it that writers should choose their associates carefully, since they will end up thinking and talking just like them.