Parade – book review

I wanted to like Rachel Cusk’s latest experimental novel, in which she writes about various artists, all known only as ‘G’. The truth is that I found it alienating and irritating and struggled to finish it

Parade by Rachel Cusk, published by Faber.

reviewed by CHRISTIANA SPENS

In Rachel Cusk’s latest experimental novel, readers are introduced to several artists, each known only as “G”. These portraits are revealed through simple vignettes, weaving around one another from various points of view. In these characters, we might think we recognise the author, but she remains out of shot, invisible, much like the film-maker (also “G”), who hides his name in his creative pursuit. In this jarring, chaotic space, we hear characters mourn freedoms they might have had; we hear the rumination of fresh grief; we see a woman spiral after being hit in the street by a random assailant, the knock to the head inspiring ever-more melodramatic and plaintive overthinking. We hear about the suicide of a man at a museum, after he has first wandered around an exhibition.

I wanted to like this book; I had loved Cusk’s wry fable, Second Place (2021), inspired by a story of DH Lawrence being a terrible house guest, and I was hoping for something satirical, playful and clever. Unfortunately, I struggled, putting it down perhaps 50 times, increasingly irritated. It might have been an intriguing idea for a book, but it didn’t land. I began writing notes to myself about it, as the hours wore on, and irritation became more intolerable. “If Rachel Cusk aimed to write the most alienating and irritating novel in recent years, then congratulations are in order,” I wrote, annoyed. “Combining solipsistic monologues and mind-numbingly tedious intermarital tensions, embodied by a succession of self-absorbed artists and their vacuous families, there is an increasing sense of claustrophobia and neurosis that the author builds effectively from the first page … This is experimental autofiction at its natural endpoint; reality itself is constantly doubted, ‘the self’ is endlessly erased (or ‘sacrificed’), and yet somehow a singular sense of ego (Cusk’s?) flows through every sentence, regardless of which character, author or perhaps disembodied idea is supposedly channelling it. Like a seance summoning the spirits of post-structuralist theorists, Cusk has created an absolute horror show of clashing interior monologues in a way that no other living writer is capable of. I am reminded of Artaud more than anyone, and I never liked Artaud.”

Yet something in my visceral reaction to the novel, or anti-novel, concerned me. Was it such a terrible novel, or was this a more personal reaction? Was it because it reminded me of people I knew, conversations I had heard, catalogues I had read, thoughts I had had, and art I had seen? Yes, in part. It is, indeed, familiar; Cusk manages to capture a sense of contemporary discourse and vapid social chatter that is inherently annoying. That might still have been funny or interesting; but, unfortunately, it isn’t enough to reveal irritating people’s thoughts with no convincing emotional connection or intellectual rigour, and this is where it fell short. Cusk buries the reader with page upon page of evading dialogue, embarrassingly overprivileged self-pity, plaintive rumination, and fragments of essays about modern art that seem mostly to distract from any clear observation or feeling (or “truth” if you will, which comes up over and over in this book but is never qualified sufficiently). Parade is distressing because it is so chronically evasive, not because it is particularly direct or revealing.

Although the novel is concerned with emotion in the sense that most of the characters are unhappy in some way, the range is so limited that each character’s emotional life seems to be interchangeable and barely accessible for all the theorising. We hear about the repressed monstrosity of femininity, the subjugation of creative freedom by domestic duties, the burden of one’s biological sex, the transactional nature of every relationship, the inability to express love. These are all interesting and sympathetic subjects on the face of it, but because the characters here are not characters, but signifiers of particular social stereotypes to back up a theoretical argument, I could not connect to their struggles. It read like an animated essay, rather than a novel; only it had no clear argument to make up for its lack of plot.

To worsen the situation, there is a succession of aphoristic soundbites about various important topics that don’t really make sense. While we could understand this as a revelation that every statement uttered is subjective and there is no objective truth about anything, such insight doesn’t make it any better to read (or particularly profound). I just kept disagreeing with it. When one artist’s wife looks at his “upside-down” paintings (which resemble those of Georg Baselitz): “The feeling of everything seeming right yet being fundamentally wrong was one she powerfully recognised: it was her condition, the condition of her sex.” Really? Are women any more upside-down than men? Is it a condition of our sex to have no sense of gravity or reality or being “right”? Sounds like a male-artist thing to say!

I disagreed on a quip about motherhood, too: “To be a mother is to live piercingly and inescapably in the moment. The artist who is also a mother must leave the moment in order to access a moment of a very different nature, and each time she does it a cost is exacted, the cost of experience.” While obviously we all have our subjective experiences, this is presented as a general truth and it is patently untrue; it is possible to work when children are at school, for instance, or if they are not at school, it is possible to daydream without losing anything, it’s possible to think intellectual thoughts when children are in bed, it is possible to have a creative thought and a more child-focused thought at the exact same time. It need not be a massive catastrophe, an affront to the genius of the artist, that a baby exists in the same room. And yet for one character, even though her children are grownup, she is apparently tortured by the screams of children in the streets outside her house, reminded of the past time in which she also had younger children. 

“Some days, in the city, all the children seemed to be crying. They are wheeled along the streets in their chairs, wailing like sirens. Their tear-streaked faces can be seen through the windows of passing cars as they sob disconsolately in their car seats. In the park, in the supermarket, on the buses and trains, their sounds of lamentation fill the air, like those of seers who have glimpsed some unspeakable horror about to befall us. Their parents handle them with studied patience while not seeming to address the causes of their unhappiness. They bear them weeping through the streets, as though they are merely the caretakers of these beings whose sorrowful message is meant for us all.”

It is comically plaintive. After my own son asked me why I kept opening and then putting down a book in a frustrated way, I read this passage out to him, and he laughed and laughed in response. Then I asked him: “So what do you think of it then?” and he replied: “Rachel Cusk is so skibidi.” At first, I smiled at this typical child response, but as I went back to the novel later on, I realised this observation was actually quite helpful. “Skibidi” is a word I first heard about six months ago, which no one over the age of about 11 understands, but which children use to describe anything and everything. However, the point of the word is to exclude grownups, precisely because it is basically meaningless. It is a kids’ in-joke.

Later, I asked him about it, and he elaborated. “It just means something is weird or chaotic. Or nonsense. It’s a nonsense word.” I went back to Parade and realised this was as good a way to understand it as any; the novel is exclusionary and chaotic, deriving its effect from its essential lack of cohesion, from its incessant prodding of its reader. It shapeshifts and evades sense. I felt less disturbed by my reading experience, having spoken with my son, no longer desiring to throw it across the room with such fervour. My son had interrupted my aesthetic moment, and I was very grateful. 

Throughout Parade, language is used to confuse and disarm, often to present a character’s perception of events in a way that seems doubtful or even deceptive in its hyperbole. We could see this as revealing the precariousness of our own perception and experience; that our own perceptions are perhaps not shared with others, are perhaps true only for us. And yet, Cusk never quite elaborates on this; her character returns to her solipsism rather than engage with other characters in any meaningful way. In another passage, a narrator describes being thumped on the head by a passing stranger – a woman, meaning for the narrator that “the fact of her gender caused difficulties both in the recounting of the event afterward and in my own response to it”. But why it should be so strange that it is a female assailant?

At every turn, in Parade and the other Cusk novels, the author reduces individuals to their gender; and yet she complains that life traps women in patriarchal structures. Surely this epic complaint-monologue is only reinforcing the stereotype of the afflicted female artist? If anything, the assailant should be celebrated by Cusk as subverting gender norms, but instead she is just characterised, predictably, as a passing madwoman, whereby the narrator can fix the focus back on her internal monologue rather than truly engage with the world and the other people in it.

When the Cusk-like narrator regains consciousness, she notices her attacker looking at her from a distance, “like an artist stepping back to admire her creation” as she (the real artist!) sees it – though this is the narrator’s observation, leading to further thoughts about her own suppressed monstrosity, rather than any awareness that another female character might be using her agency for reasons Cusk’s narrator simply doesn’t understand (maybe she read her book?). Every character in Parade merely supports the tyranny of the polemic and is afforded no convincing independence from that central stream of consciousness. This moment of violence, perceived with so much melodrama, becomes symbolic to the narrator of a kind of death. Though she is back on her feet within moments, with no lasting damage, she describes the perpetrator as “an assassin”, the attack as “a death”, even though it was neither. In any case, the blow to the head does little to stem the internal monologue. She waxes lyrical about how a random act of violence is also like a work of art or performance.   

But why compare everything to art when it is not comparable? It merely deflects real engagement. We can always compare any act to an artistic act; a real thump on the head is also like a performance of a thump on the head. So what? Does this really help us understand anything? People do things to one another; performance is part of everyday life. Writing and art then represent and comment on aspects of everyday life. This is not radical or profound. People do things and they represent people doing things. Things happen in dramatic ways. Yes, to a point, life is a performance, a sick parade. If only Parade had a little more sense of dramatic logic and humour, then the whole experience might be more bearable. Cusk’s point is that we are all performing our roles, stuck in them, and yet this is a hollow, nihilistic understanding, betraying a lack of ability to connect to other people or to really take anyone else seriously – as unknown others, rather than simply another mask in the street or a cameo in Cusk’s inner world.

When a man falls to his death from a museum balcony, the artist (bearing some resemblance to Louise Bourgeois) and her entourage talk about him very briefly before managing to turn the suicide into a talk about their work again, frustrated that a man taking his own life has distracted from an important female artist’s big moment. While this might, in another author’s hands, be a darkly satirical scene about the sociopathy of the art world, here it is just alienating and off. It is one of many moments that betrays a seemingly chronic inability to recognise other people as anything other than props in one’s interior monologue.

The author comes and goes as she pleases, mostly hiding behind long, often incoherent, obtuse conversations. She writes about other artists doing things to hint that she also is doing those things – taking the role of invisible director, moving things around behind the scenes. And perhaps there is a kind of realism in the way it takes all these disjointed conversations, exhibitions, and unresolved tensions to get to a place where the narrator, or narrators, can express anything directly. A depiction of emotional impotence becomes a frustrating ordeal for the receiving reader though.  

While Parade could be understood as a kind of Dada joke, a prank, it is not an especially funny or radical one. It’s one thing to be stuck in an exhibition gallery for 20 minutes, seeing random conceptual art that seems to have no actual meaning; but to be stuck in a novel – for a whole day, perhaps – is a nightmare. Having to stay with these aimless monologues and characters, have them inside your own head, seems an intrusion I would rather not indulge for the sake of noticing that people sometimes perform roles in life, that representation is not always reliable (shocker!). It feels at times as though Cusk is punishing her readers intentionally, experimenting on them in a tediously sadomasochistic dynamic. It seems arrogant, a waste of time.  

Only at the end is it clear where all the dissociation, unreality and evasion of self is coming from, and where a sense of emotional honesty is finally reached. It felt as though author did not really want the reader to read the whole book, however, to get to that vulnerable part. Conscious or not, the novel was an exercise in evasion and dissociation, until the very end, by which time many readers will have given up. This is not to say there is nothing of value; only that the desire to hide, to conceal and to alienate creates a reading experience that most will abandon before they reach the point where they can receive “the truth” that Cusk finally doles out, and which didn’t need a whole novel for its expression anyway.

• Parade by Rachel Cusk is published by Faber, price £16.99