Book Review: ‘Parade’

Rachel Cusk’s eagerly awaited, mind-boggling new work, Parade, should come affixed with a warning label: her narrative style both intrigues the reader and leaves them out in the cold.

Cusk has been writing this way for the last several years to great acclaim. Many readers will be familiar with her trilogy, Outline (2014), Transit (2016), and Kudos (2018), which knocked the literary establishment to its knees with its daring inventiveness and casual dismissal of literary conventions. All three books of the trilogy feature a somewhat muted and disguised narrator named Faye, who seems to serve as a receptacle of sorts for other people’s stories and rarely interjects herself into the text.

But longtime readers might remember a radically different sort of literary output from Rachel Cusk. In 2001, she wrote A Life’s Work, a book about her maternal ambivalence as a young mother that shocked many in the literary world with its fierce and unrelenting honesty. In 2012, she wrote another brutally candid memoir called Aftermath about her acrimonious divorce to her daughter’s father. Many in the literary establishment attacked Cusk, saying she went too far. Cusk stopped writing for a while and regrouped only to return with a trilogy which established her reputation as a rare talent. She spoke candidly about her disgust for the restraints her earlier work had placed upon her and the vulnerability it had exposed her to. She felt proud reinventing herself and her writing career in a language and style that was all its own, one that ignored linearity or character development or other prerequisites that guide novelists.

In restructuring her work, she remained focused on the themes that had always preoccupied her: sex, feminism, writing, childrearing, vulnerability, as well as the imbalance between men and women in marriage. But now, she was doing it on her own terms. It’s hard not to find literary streaks of brilliance in anything Cusk produces, but there is an emotional chilliness that now seems embedded in all her prose. It’s unclear why she feels this is an advancement over the text she once wrote with such wondrous and fearless abandon. In fact, it’s difficult to get out of your mind that she is just hiding, perhaps in her own elaborately designed verbiage. But it is hiding, nonetheless. And the question remains; why does Rachel Cusk feel she has to?

In the opening pages of Parade, we learn about an artist named G who begins to paint his wife upside down, which irritates her because she is certain “that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition.” G always expressed his firm belief “that women shouldn’t be artists.” His wife knows most men think the same, but she still finds it obnoxious that G would say this out loud. She feels her femininity is somewhat a curse, yet she must endure it. The couple lives far from the town square after harsh criticism of G’s painting. He needs the solace of the countryside to rejuvenate his artistic temperament.

The novel soon catapults us elsewhere and does so continually throughout the narrative, whose voice changes from third to first person and back again often without explanation. Some characters will return to us only to disappear again and almost everything seems shrouded in mystery. We are now in the presence of another person named G who addresses us directly. She’s been forced for inexplicable reasons to vacate the apartment she lived in for over a year and immediately misses the large ornate mirror into which she would peer and which allowed her “to be seen in proportion to other things.” This G tries to find a new place to live and grows restless and disoriented as the days pass. One day, as she’s walking down the street, and another woman punches her in the face for no reason and flees, with her fist raised defiantly in the air. Cusk describes how shellshocked G feels as she roams the streets after her assault, reliving the incident in her mind: “Those few seconds repeated themselves over and over before my mind’s eye, like something trapped and unable to find an exit…” We feel invested in this G’s story, though it has just begun, but Cusk has other plans for us.

We do meet this woman again later and find that she is still ailing. Cusk writes, “A sickness had taken possession of me since the attack, of body, but also of mind. The boundary of possibility moved, and the world was now a different place. Its properties had been inverted: the self and its preoccupations were shrunken and impotent, and the exterior plane with prospects of imminent danger and disorder greatly enlarged.”

Another G awaits us who lives in the late 19th century and dies from childbirth at thirty-one. She often paints herself heavily pregnant in the nude. She asks herself before death, “Can the element of the eternal in the experience of femininity ever be represented as more than an internalized state?” This question seems to encapsulate a lifetime of Cusk’s thinking about feminine concerns. We are not sure what she is trying to say. Does she feel it is still almost impossible for women to express themselves freely without fear of condemnation? Does she resent the way women’s bodies are fetishized as their thoughtfulness is minimized or even ignored? Is she traumatized by the tyranny of childbirth and motherhood, or the reality that after any mother gives birth to a child, they are never in full possession of themselves or their own time again?

Cusk seems present here despite all the intricacies erected to hide her. Sometime later in these pages, the narrator seems to shift ever so slightly and says, “The screaming children fill me with impatience and a sort of dread, as though they represent some universal tasks from which I will never be free. At night, I frequently dream that someone has given me their baby to look after and disappeared. In these dreams, I am not impatient: there is a harrowing anxiety.” We hear G’s fear of maternal engulfment and the power it wields to crush one’s artistic impulse and can’t help but think about Cusk and her own harrowing journey into motherhood.

How we wish Cusk had the tenacity to remain where she just was a moment ago instead of taking us to revisit the first G, only to learn his wife wants only to feel alive. She watches a family playing contentedly with one another, noticing how lovely it is to witness the father being present for his children alongside his wife, and we hear her think about own husband’s selfishness. She has given him a home and children and everything he longed for, and she feels thwarted. But now, watching this happy family makes her realize there is the possibility of having both parents lead gratifying and consuming lives in both the domestic sphere and outside of it. She regrets that her life offered up no such choices.

Another G who has achieved great success with a supportive husband, children, and a nanny to boot appears on the horizon. Her husband takes an excessive number of photographs of her daughter. It bothers her since she notices her daughter never smiles and passively stares at the camera almost melting away into the lens focused upon her. Her daughter’s acts of submissive posing are a disturbing sight that agitates her. Cusk writes, “Other people had photographs of their children blowing out birthday candles or playing football, but G’s husband never photographed their daughter doing such things.” We feel stranded in dangerous territory.

Cusk’s decision to play so recklessly with form, continuity, shape, and structure is a decision she came to later in life after feeling overexposed by her early, searing memoirs. One can’t deny she has pulled off an ingenious reinvention, but it’s not without its downfalls. Her new work often feels cold and disconnected. And it seems to serve as a smokescreen for her psychological distress. But one wonders if this self-censoring has a shelf life. Because there comes a point when all the various G’s whom we’ve met suddenly seem to collapse on themselves like a floppy deck of used cards, and we yearn for the younger author’s gutsy daring.

Cusk has claimed she will never write as she did as a younger author, but I hope she changes her mind. Because that’s when I fell in love with Rachel Cusk and her brazenness, which helped me as a young writer understand the myriad forces coming for me. It was her plain honesty and clarity about her experience with motherhood, marriage, and the desire for so much more that spoke to countless readers who did not need all the camouflage.

It was rather her truth, pure and unadulterated, that caught us unaware and left many of us spellbound.