Rachel Cusk’s Inverted World

Rachel Cusk’s Parade appears in its early pages to uphold a grand tradition: the novel about an artist. G is a painter, much admired but “angry and hurt by the world.” G, notable for rendering images upside down, works in a somewhat gimmicky mode, but he’s more than a showman. “At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake,” Cusk writes, “but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality.” Cusk’s cursory description of this work—“slender birch trees in sunlight,” “a man cowering alone in bed”—suggests she knows that art’s power is ineffable, beyond its appearance.

Readers who know Cusk may think they’re on familiar ground. Cusk’s previous novel, 2021’s Second Place, is about the relationship between a woman and an artist who is her houseguest; the man’s work affects her intellectually, but the novel is more interested in what his presence in her home does to his host’s life. And Cusk has written nonfiction in the past on the subject of interior design, less interested in its aesthetic than its psychic dimension: She sees rooms as “expressive works, attempts to perfect reality and hold it in an eternal moment,” places that tell us something about the people who created them.

Yet Parade is no such exploration. Because the next time we meet G, he isn’t a painter. Now G is a filmmaker, a different person altogether perhaps, though one similarly animated by a contrary spirit: “People were often baffled or even angered by his films. They expected a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it.” We also get another G, who is a painter, but a different one; this third G is a woman: “She painted everything she dreaded and hated, but joyously, like a child exerting power in private by playing with plastic figures and making them do things to each other.”

All these Gs are the protagonist of Parade, and share that role with Cusk’s signature I, not to be confused with an authorial I, though it’s tempting to collapse those two, most notably for readers of her celebrated trilogy of novels (Outline, Transit, and Kudos). The protagonist of those chilly, oblique works is a British writer in middle age; along with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental accounting of his own life and Ben Lerner’s cerebral Künstlerromane, they’re widely credited with making autofiction so au courant. Critics noted Cusk’s direct, even blunt, style; gossips relished the intersections between the fiction and the author’s biography. It’s hard not to understand G’s imagined films and paintings as statement of purpose for Parade: a novel but upside down, an act of storytelling uninterested in “resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality.” Perhaps Cusk was weary of being associated with Faye, the protagonist of Outline and its sequels. Those novels were always more than a mirror; Parade, shattered into fragments, cannot be mistaken for one.

Many of its practitioners seem to feel that the novel is a moribund form; to revolutionize or rehabilitate it might seem to necessitate breaking the text into fragments, or grafting autobiographical fact onto it, or illustrating it with photographs, or some strategy as yet unseen. I can’t guess at Cusk’s perspective on the viability of the form, but it’s not insignificant that this is the fifth novel she’s published in a decade. I think a reader can accept a novel that declines to “resolve” reality’s confusions—only certain murder mysteries, with their moral clarity, their emphasis on questions answered, really promise that—but perhaps when you turn it upside down, a novel becomes something else altogether, as inversion turns a 6 into a 9.

Plot is of little interest in Parade, synopsis beside the point. There is an actual parade in Parade, but the title is most apt insofar as the text is a procession of voices and psyches and makes it hard to parse assertions marching past—the novel is a pageant, equal parts pomp and absurdity. We read of G the upside-down painter and his wife on sojourn in Italy; then we are given sections, told in the first-person plural, set in that country. Is this, then, his wife speaking? It doesn’t altogether matter, worth mentioning only because this is the extent to which Cusk is uninterested in the clarity some readers might demand.

G’s wife believes that her husband has “brilliantly elucidated” reality in his work, creating something “identical to its companion reality in every particular but for the complete inversion of its moral force.” This is, we are told, “the closest thing she knew to the mystery and tragedy of her own sex.” Cusk doesn’t linger on the paintings themselves, and wholly withholds detail about these people. There’s often no description of faces or bodies, and no data: their races, their ages, whether they are alive now or decades ago. There is scant dialogue, few scenes. These do not feel like characters, but ideas. How might an upside-down painting invert reality’s “moral force”? And what is meant by moral force anyway, and why would a woman’s sex be a “mystery and tragedy” even to her?

Cusk moves on without answering these questions, to the tale of a woman in a foreign city, who is randomly hit in the head by a stranger, “deranged by madness or addiction.” This inexplicable act (her attacker is a woman; this is significant) occasions a kind of psychic split. She comes to feel that she “had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive.” The narrator reflects that up to this point she has refused to accept as her own experience the vulnerability or harms that arose, she says, “in one way or another of my biological femininity.” She had instead attributed such experiences to an “alternate or double self”—a sort of “stuntman” that would “absorb and confine” those specifically feminine experiences “so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life.” If the Gs were fragmentary, this section’s narrator is a fragment of a fragment, deliberately splitting herself in order to elude being defined by the world.

Later, this speaker attends an exhibition by an artist G, some shade of Louise Bourgeois, based on the description of a sculpted figure hanging from the ceiling:

It was genderless, this floating being, returned to a primary innocence that was also tragic, as though in this dream-state of suspension we might find ourselves washed clean of the violence of gender, absolved of its misdemeanours and injustices, its diabolical driving of the story of life.

Seeing this work and reflecting on her attack cause this section’s narrator to think of childbirth, “when I had passed as if through a mirror into an inchoate, animal region, a place with no words.” She goes on: “Why did it make sense for a woman to hit me? It was as though a violence underlying female identity had risen up and struck.”

We’ve had G’s wife decry the “mystery and tragedy” of her femininity; now we have another character diagnose her sex’s latent violence. When a fiction strips away scene and the forward momentum of storytelling, such resonances not only become clear; they must be the point. Cusk abets this, prioritizing gnomic pronouncements over story. She writes with enough brio that the veracity of such aphorisms can feel slippery. To wit: “Art, rooted in insanity, transforms itself through process into sanity: it is matter, the body, that is insane.” I cannot work out whether I agree, or even understand this statement.

A moment of simple scene-setting reminds us of Cusk’s gifts as a writer: “The ochre wound of the quarry glittered when the sun touched it and the sound of birdsong and of the cattle rustling in the dry olive groves began to infiltrate the waiting silence.” This single line, not significant, really, is nevertheless so beautifully rendered that it’s frustrating to see Cusk direct her energy to strange, toothless abstractions. This narrative in the Italian countryside—there’s an old farmer, his wife, and their child, a long-abandoned house—has the feel of a dream or anecdote. Such discursions can enrich a fiction, but there’s a peril in piling too many atop one another, revealing that often these stories matter most to the dreamer or the teller of the tale.

Parade’s longest section will feel familiar (indeed, welcome) to fans of Outline and its sequels. We are dropped into a scene that is mostly heady conversation, which is Cusk—a shrewd observer, plainly a keen listener—at her best. This portion of the novel is devoted to an exhibition of the work of the G who seems a stand-in for Bourgeois. Plans for a conference on the artist’s work are disrupted when one of the museum patrons leaps to his death in the gallery. Some of the attendees meet at a restaurant to commiserate. Cusk allows us to see what transpires more fully—“Julia was a handsome woman with flowing dark hair and a beret set at a piratical angle on her head.” This attention to detail and description could suggest that the author feels this moment is significant; one might also understand it as evidence that the novel is lopsided, or could have benefited from one more revision.

This group engages in the sort of repartee people often do in books, stylized to the point of unreality, but that is an inherent aspect of fiction. I nodded along as the museum director laments the contemporary experience of seeing art:

They 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 perhaps a bloodless thing to discuss in the wake of a suicide, if the subject a table of intellectuals would end up on, or a flourish we accept inside a novel. Cusk turns to questions of sex and parenthood. One of the men wonders why a woman artist would have a child: “to invite something into your life that will directly and intimately sabotage your capacity to work is slightly mystifying.” One of his companions argues that every child imagines their mother might have achieved greatness: “Maybe we feel that way because we are guilty of wrecking our mothers’ lives.”

These are refrains that run throughout Parade. The context doesn’t matter: “G believed that women could not be artists. As far as G’s wife was concerned this was what most people believed,” Cusk writes. Of a painting by another G, this one of a Black artist, now dead, we’re told: “It was exhibited after his death alongside that of certain female contemporaries, as though marginality were itself an identity, inalterable and therefÒore situated beyond change.” Of the Bourgeois G, Cusk notes, “Something had changed: somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness.”

Throughout, the author declines to elucidate. An inevitable consequence of this strategy is that all this begins to feel like chatter. Parade wants to tackle an intersecting network of concerns—the violence of childbirth, reconciling parental and artistic ambition, the persistence of a woman’s identity independent of child or spouse, the notion that there’s some essential quality of femininity. But the book is not willing to animate any of these; they are not the themes of a story, they are sloganeering. It’s possible that Cusk’s point is that this line of inquiry leads to a cul-de-sac, that we’re all trapped there, surrounded by words.

The museum director informs her companions that she’s leaving her job.

I’m moving to one of the islands, where there are no museums, and where I’ve been lucky even to find a school for my daughter. It is a little school with only one class that has all the island’s children in it. I will take her there every morning and I will come back to collect her every afternoon, and if she likes she can even come home for lunch.

The director goes on: “Perhaps you don’t approve … and you’re not the only one, but in the end what difference does it make?” Not inconceivable that an accomplished woman might opt to prioritize motherhood, but somewhat less credible that a woman this bright would be blasé about such a significant choice. The book knows that these questions of sex and power do matter. I wish Parade would rise to the challenge of showing its reader how and why.

There are further storylines and characters; I’m not sure it’s worthwhile to catalog them here. In each, Cusk returns to these same themes. There are many artful moments, but there is also rhetoric that obfuscates: “In the system of love, we soon came to understand, all the things that were free retained their appearance of freedom while in fact being conscripted into ownership. Was love itself a system of ownership?” It is possible that some readers will accept axiom supplanting story, character, and scene; it is plain that I am not such a reader.

Here’s another snippet, its context not especially salient: “There is the suspicion that the products of capitalism are intended not to last. Our mother’s lifetime was the lifetime of capitalism. Was she herself a commodity?” The same question seems worth asking of Cusk. Across her body of work, the author has been drawn to certain ideas—the tensions between artistic ambition and the realities of married life and motherhood, the gulf between intellectual pursuit and reality. Parade doesn’t engage with these ideas, simply offers them to us, a commodity, now, a new book by Rachel Cusk, an upside-down novel. Unlike G’s groundbreaking paintings, this work does not herald the advent of a reality, though perhaps that’s too much to ask of any writer, any book.