Rachel Cusk’s new novel, “Parade,” is an experiment that foregrounds theme, striking its notes — on gender, artmaking, motherhood, freedom, death — with force. Like a musical composition with a recurring melody, it features a number of visual artists from different times and places, men and women, all named G., and unnamed narrators (both “we” and “I”) who travel to museum exhibitions, are assaulted in the street, and grieve, or grieve their lack of grief, when their mother dies.
The first G. is a painter who turns his canvases upside down, and in so doing accidentally exposes something essential, his wife thinks, about the experience of womanhood. Cusk’s characters often wrestle with or feel imprisoned by stark gender binaries that are so exaggerated, even atrophied, that they become a kind of camp. In “Parade,” women seethe with private domestic wrath, or they agonize over the “non-existence” that necessarily underwrites “female art,” which demands, in the absence of an “inviolable self,” the artist’s body. Yet this “inviolable self” turns out to be a fantasy that men also must pursue. The last G. is a writer turned filmmaker who fantasizes about being nothing other than a recording eye. “Why was it impossible to create without identity?” he wonders, and the form of “Parade” itself, its many G.’s, is one answer to that question.
Like Cusk’s last novel, “Second Place,” “Parade” is an investigation into the lives of artists. Yet the way it uses art is something of a feint. Many passages analyze fictional artworks or assert what they mean, but these assertions are not overly rooted in description or attention to material, in what art looks like. “One of the things that interests me about G’s work,” one character says, “is that she treats both sexes as doomed by gender, as almost interchangeable in that sense, so that a third sex emerges in which the man and the woman have merged into each other and become neutral.”
Such a dynamic is familiar to readers of Cusk, who may recall her assertion, in her memoir “Aftermath,” that she and her ex-husband each became “half-man” and “half-woman.” But the idea doesn’t help the reader to see the artwork in her mind or to understand how an artwork might signify these ideas. This is not because Cusk lacks the ability to describe. (A little while later, the narrator notices that “the dull black sky was mottled like a bruise with greenish light.”) It’s because in “Parade,” art is mostly a vehicle or prop for ideas that Cusk has previously worked out. The novel does not give the impression of discovering these ideas along the way but of demonstrating, or indeed, parading them.
Cusk has been widely celebrated for her Outline trilogy, which threw out the wrought-iron architecture of her early work for a narrator who listens to other people talk. Those three novels are elegant reductions that coalesce around ideas, but they do not do away with character or story. They are feats of both, and the occasional presence, in “Parade,” of an inherently interesting situation or event, around which characters gather as if by a fire, is a reminder of what we are missing out on. What is most remarkable in the book are moments when Cusk’s use of figurative language cuts through the thicket of ideas and abstraction. Of one G.’s capitulation to the norms of marriage: “By her second or third encounter with her husband she was ready to come out, like the cornered suspect in a film, with her hands up.” When a man looks at his dying mother: “He wandered around and around her face as though it were some government building that had finally been opened to the public.” Only a master of literary technique can afford to strip characters to their bare, indelible gestures, carved with a needle and bathed in acid, like etchings.
Much of “Parade” philosophizes about the difficulty of making art as a woman and a mother, and the impossibility of ever getting free of one’s parents. If motherhood is a trap for the female artist — perhaps a necessary compromise, as Cusk has said elsewhere, for its power to impose limits, and the opportunity it offers of working against them — childhood is a trap for everyone. One G., a painter, leaves home but continues to call her parents to receive their discouragement and insults; she has so confused shame with love that she marries a man who controls and disparages her. “Like a dog slinking back to a cruel master, she came at the call of his disgust.”
Mothers who eat their young have stalked Cusk’s work since her debut novel, “Saving Agnes,” in 1993, where the theme was most forcefully delivered not in the form of the protagonist’s actual mother, who is insensitive but ambivalently redeemed, but in the image of a rabbit who consumes her hairless kits shortly after birthing them. (“She appeared to be growing fatter as they watched. She ate a third baby and a fourth. Her eyes grew dreamy.”) Like this hungry leporid, the mothers in “Parade” gorge themselves on disappointments and fabrications. The adult children of one such mother remember that she preferred them when they were small, “before our will and character began to obstruct her will and character. Once, she said that what she had in fact liked best was being pregnant. … Pregnancy was a reverse kind of authorship, where the work started after publication and the suspension of disbelief came before the story had begun.” Death does not loosen her power or lead to a separation; for Cusk, who is so attuned to relations of power, one is either subsumed or subsuming. After she dies, the children experience a discomfiting integration, realizing that “she was inside us, as once we had been inside her.”
“Parade,” too, gets inside the reader, in spite of or because of Cusk’s refusal of the usual contracts between the (female) writer and reader. It doesn’t flirt or titillate or entertain or amuse; it isn’t maternal; it doesn’t “care” or console; and it certainly doesn’t sympathize. Some of it feels like an argument with someone who isn’t anywhere on the page. But halfway through the novel, some people encounter the detritus of a literal parade, which has left “a snow of litter and broken glass” on the streets. In the darkening hours after the parade, a museum director reflects on the “disturbances of reality” that feel connected to the “power of disturbance in G’s work.” Cusk’s work also has this power, to disturb and unsettle, to subtly rearrange the space of one’s mind.
Christine Smallwood is a Book World contributing writer and the author of the novel “The Life of the Mind.”
By Rachel Cusk
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 198 pp. $27
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