A daring but divisive experiment in fiction

Rachel Cusk pushes boundaries in her latest novel, blurring lines between art and life. Not recommended for the faint hearted.

The novel is a mosaic of disparate lives questioning the meaning of being alive. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock 

Rachel Cusk is one of the few English writers who are redefining the idea of the novel by experimenting extensively with its form and content. Her Outline trilogy (consisting of Outline, Transit, and Kudos) changed the way we think of a novel by weaving together fiction and autobiography so deftly that the lines between the two were blurred. Her latest novel, Parade, proceeds on a similar path but takes up even more challenges on the way.

Published in The New Yorker last year, “The Stuntman” is the first of the four vignettes that make up Cusk’s novel on art, motherhood, morality, marginality, dissociation, and capitalism. In all four vignettes, we meet artists named G, not the same but different people with the same name tag. Each of them approaches art in a uniquely individual way: one paints the inverted image of his wife; one does a portrait of themselves as pregnant; one draws vile, pornographic figures; one writes a failed novel.

Parade

By Rachel Cusk

Faber & Faber/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pages: 208

Price: Rs.2,040

The third person narration about these artists is interspersed with the voice of a writer in Paris who speaks in first person singular and plural. We see this writer, a woman, being hit by another woman, travelling to a strange village, dining with curators, mourning the loss of their mother. The novel, if it can be called so, is a mosaic of disparate lives questioning the meaning of being alive.

In all her books, Cusk examines the dynamics of identity politics, revealing how they inform life. Her debut novel, Saving Agnes, published in 1993, had a young girl sketching a hilarious portrait of a woman who is lost, broke, sexually betrayed. It foregrounded feminine subjectivity, which Cusk continues to explore in her later works. In the Booker longlisted novel, Second Place (2021), her gaze shifted to an older, married woman who invites an artist, her former crush, to her coastal home to make it easier for her to know herself.

In Parade, Cusk seems to do away with characterisation altogether as she devotes herself to the investigation of identity politics through the stories of the four Gs and the writer. This group of five seems rather lifeless, acting as they do as the vehicles of Cusk’s views on society. None of their dilemmas is resolved—their stories just taper off, leaving the reader bewildered. This is in line with Cusk’s idea of dialectic as something that can offer no synthesis for the creative artist. They can only live with “violence and silence”, qualities that define Cusk’s novels too. It is all very profound, of course, but the plot of Parade cracks under the burden of the philosophising.

The marginalised artist

Cusk’s central project is to examine the self in the different roles it plays: mother, lover, husband, wife, and so on. Like J.M. Coetzee’s character the elderly academic Elizabeth Costello (who serves as the author’s alter ego), the artists and writers in Cusk are routinely misunderstood by society. They are held at gunpoint for daring to express, for inverting reality to their whims. For instance, the third G is a mother and wife whose “mildly pornographic” paintings of women, meant to depict feminine shame, earn her the censure of society and of her husband. However, the husband’s lewd depictions of their daughter are thought to be harmless by the police. G is judged because of her gender, underlining ingrained societal prejudices.

Cover of Parade | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

The concept of the “marginalised artist” is analysed through the figures of a Black man, an abused wife, a mean-spirited mother, and a homosexual philosopher—all of whom force us to think of art in relation to the artist’s life. Cusk complicates the process by herself staying elusive, yet just there, in all the narratives. “You just need to look at artists who had children, she said, to find some of the worst instances of neglect in the annals of parenthood…. G herself, Betsy added, was not without sin when it came to motherhood”—here one is reminded of Cusk’s memoir, A Life’s Work, which angered some readers with its depiction of motherhood.

Who is an artist?

Cusk makes space for the responsibility of artists towards society but also interrogates the responsibility society owes to artists. Should artists, especially marginalised artists, practise restraint to avoid ruffling feathers? But is it not the duty of the artist to speak out, to critique society through their work?

The problem with Parade is that here the structural experimentation is taken a step too far, to the point of causing confusion. A parade outside a museum is described as “phantasmagoric”, an apt description of the novel itself, with its array of wispy characters who leave no impression on the reader’s mind. Yes, the ideas it puts forward are complex and urgent, but the risks taken by Cusk in presenting them as fiction do not pay off. What the Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, who also combines autobiography with fiction, does in several books, Cusk tries to achieve in one—and fails.

Readers approaching Cusk for the first time should probably stay away from Parade. For readers already acquainted with Cusk’s oeuvre, the risks she undertakes in this novel can come across as either unsettling or spellbinding.

Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. He writes about books @fook_bood on Instagram and @rahulzsing on X.