"Parade" by Rachel Cusk

Meditations on art and gender differences in a series of linked stories. Winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction at its most novel.

This was the first time I have read a book by Rachel Cusk. She is clearly an innovative and experimental writer of huge talent. This novel (is it a 'nouveau roman' novel or a series of linked vignettes?) reminded me of Natalie Sarraute's Tropismes. But I'm not sure that I understood it nor can I properly appreciate it on a first reading. This is a novelist I need to study. Nevertheless, this is an attempt at a review.

It seems to be an exploration of what it means to be an artist, particularly focusing on the difference between male and female artists. A number of artists are described, all called G. Some of them include:

• A male artist who paints upside down: "not the first man to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves."
• A female sculptor: “It seemed to lie within the power of G's femininity, to unsex the human form.” (The Stuntman)
• “A late-nineteenth-century woman painter dead of childbirth at the age of thirty-one.” who does nude self-portraits. (The Stuntman)
• A black artist who paints a cathedral. (The Stuntman)
• An incognito film-maker: “For those accustomed to the camera's penetration of social and physical boundaries and the strange authority of its prying eye, this absence of what might be called leadership was noticeable.” (The Spy)

Despite sometimes suggesting that male art is valid, the author seems on the whole to believe that male artists are exploitative: “The creativity of men, which is not creativity at all but a mode of conquest, disgusts him.” (The Spy)

Other storylines include:

• A woman is punched to the ground by another woman and develops the urge to do the same to someone else.
• A man commits suicide by jumping from the top floor of an art gallery to the marble of the vestibule.
• A couple spend time in a holiday cottage on a failing farm in the countryside.

It is structured into four sections, titled The Stuntman, The Midwife, The Parade, and The Spy. I wondered whether the author was proposing these as attributes of an artist. But the stories are fragmented and some of them appear in more than one section. It was as if the author had deliberately embraced incoherence, as in the novels of William Burroughs (such as Naked Lunch). 

There is the occasional unsupported declarative statement, such as “To be a mother is to live piercingly and inescapably in the moment.” (The Stuntman) but on the whole the author seems to prefer exploration to discovery. Ideas percolate through the chaos: I suspect this means that every reader will construct their own meanings. I'm not sure that I have constructed anything meaningful.

Nevertheless, I gathered pleasure from her writing. If the plots are tangled, the characters seem even more complex, which I enjoy. The stories are rooted in the everyday (of an educated modern middle class) and had immense verisimilitude. There were some wonderful descriptive passages:

• “Her form glimmered strangely among the slashing diagonals of light that reached it from the window.” (The Stuntman)
• “Goats stood motionless In the contorted boughs of the olive trees amid the shrieking of cicadas. The reeds made a hissing sound as the winds surged through them. The shrill heat scoured the land and sky and rendered them senseless.” (The Midwife)
• “The days passed slowly and indistinguishably ... as though they were the same day examined from different angles, like the sparkling facets of a diamond.” (The Midwife)
• “After the parade, a snow of litter and broken glass covered the streets.” (The parade)

The third section, The Parade, reminded me of the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, such as Parents and Children or Manservant and Maidservant.  It is a meal in a restaurant, described mostly in dialogue. There are wonderful ICBisms such as:

• “Why don't you order some wine? Julia said to him. It will make your audience more appreciative.” (The Parade)
• “How strange it is, how actually bizarre, that some people take it into their heads to create objects for the rest of us to look at.” (The Parade)
• “There are plenty of men who are afraid of men, Mauro said.” (The Parade)

Selected quotes:

• “G began to paint large, intricate landscapes in which nature ... basked in a wordless moral plenitude, innocent and unconscious of the complete inversion it had undergone.” (The Stuntman)
• “The exhibition was a memorial in thread and cloth, a knitted cathedral.” (The Stuntman)
• “Her children are adults now, and she looks back on her history with them in a fatigued kind of amazement, like a retired general recalling past battles.” (The Stuntman)
• “An architect had designed the country place for them, and it sometimes felt as though they were inhabiting his notion of how they should spend their time.” (The Midwife)
• “Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did - the rest of her remained obstinately alive.” (The Spy)
• “His ambition, so long held that it had the character of an assumption, was to be a writer, and it had seemed to him that teaching would naturally fit with that goal. but in fact there could have been nothing worse than to encumber himself with the obligation to form and control children.” (The Spy)
• “He wasn't interested in change. He was interested in the fragments that change leaves behind in its storming passage to the future.” (The Spy)
• “The sense of being seen was fundamental to the construction of civilized behaviour, to the extent that most people continue to behave in that way even when they were alone. Why did they? If not the eye of God, was it simply the gaze of authority they felt upon them?” (The Spy)
• “Some of these feelings were presentable enough to show in public; others were left to roam the attics and cellars.” (The Spy)

I am excited to discover this author and fully conscious that I don't understand what is going on. I must reread this book soon (unfortunately it is due back at the library imminently) and explore more of Cusk's work. In the meantime, if any of the readers of this blog would like to help my understanding of Cusk, please add your comments below.

January 2025; 198 pages

Published in 2024 by Faber & Faber

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God