Book Review: ‘Parade,’ by Rachel Cusk - The New York Times

Fiction

Her new novel, “Parade,” considers the perplexity and solipsism of the creative life.

By Dwight Garner

PARADE, by Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk, the author of the autobiographical Outline trilogy of novels, has written so well for so long that it’s almost a relief to discover that her new novel, “Parade,” is skippable for all but her most devoted tier of readers.

It arrives on these shores trailing puzzled and negative reviews from England. The contrarian in me wishes I could unhorse those faraway critics and demonstrate why they are witless hacks. The contrarian in me is going to keep silent.

Sterile, ostentatious and essentially plotless, “Parade” is an antinovel, a little black box of a book. It fails the Hardwick Test. The sole burden of an antinovel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, is that it must be consistently (“each page, each paragraph”) interesting.

“Parade” is set in the art world. Most of its characters are painters or sculptors. They are identified by the same initial — G. One G is a domineering male painter who begins painting images upside down on his canvases. A second G is a female sculptor whose hallmark images, in the manner of the artist Louise Bourgeois, are of “giant forms of black spiders, balanced on stiletto-like feet.”

A third is a 19th-century female painter who, before she died young, made self-portraits while heavily pregnant. A fourth G is a Black artist who made a small painting of a big cathedral that was “a comment about marginality.” A fifth is a filmmaker. A sixth G is a painter, coping with the burden of success, who wonders if the attention she pays her child is attention withdrawn from her art.

Other characters include the domineering artist’s wife, who meditates on her unrealized life, and, most promisingly, a woman in Paris who is attacked by a female stranger on the street. The stranger “stopped on the street corner and turned around, like an artist stepping back to admire her creation.” The stranger is a terrorist of a sort, a maker of shocking images, a pint-size bin Laden.

The reason to come to Cusk’s novels has never been plot. One comes to them for her philosophical and flaying observations on everything from art, parenting and relationships to travel, driving and conversation. She picks up the first three in “Parade,” but the talk about each is airless and abstract. She is piloting a drone over ground she previously hiked on foot.

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The art talk that consumes this novel is leaden. It is the way you might begin to speak if you were raised solely in the Tate and the Whitney and had never eaten a hot dog. Watching trees fall makes one artist reconsider the “question of verticality.” Certain paintings are shocking because they do not traffic in the “moral barter of representation.” Homeless people are “reproaches to subjectivity.” One searches for signs that Cusk is writing satire, but there are none.

Many of these artists have elite problems. They are accustomed to foreign travel and high levels of comfort; they have second homes, large studios, gleaming kitchens. At the same time, the narrative peels away into collective commentary like the following:

Suddenly we could not tolerate capitalism. We found its presence in our lives, of which it had insidiously made a prison, repellent. Was our mother a function of capitalism?

We had relied from the beginning on the manufacture of desire to camouflage the problems of truth and limitation. Was there anything we remembered from the time before this reliance? Only fragments.

Whenever I’m reading a book I find repellently pretentious, I think back to one of Jonathan Lethem’s essays, collected in his book “The Ecstasy of Influence” (2011). Lethem wrote: “My ears prick up at the word ‘pretentious’ — that’s usually the movie I want to see, the book I want to read, the scene I want to make.” I tried approaching “Parade” with Lethem’s brisk enthusiasm, but it was quickly beaten down.

A bad novel can be a one-off. Or it can cast glare on aspects of a writer’s work. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement a while back, the critic Claire Lowdon wondered what future generations will find politically odious in our fiction. Lowdon wrote: “All those casual plane journeys in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy! The takeaway coffee cups in Knausgaard!”

I wonder more about the steep solipsism of Cusk’s fiction, and of the so-called autofiction of many other gifted writers. How often can readers be made to care about the problems and prerogatives of the artist? In a good deal of Cusk’s work, non-artists by comparison lack a level of sentience and agency.

The English critic John Carey has written ringingly about these sorts of questions. The earthy fiction of Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), Carey said, “reminds us that what is most valued in most people’s lives has nothing to do with art, literature or ideas, and it admonishes us that such lives are no less sensitively lived for that absence.”

In “Parade,” lives of every sort are obscured under a fog of esoteric language. Maybe the G is for gaseous.

PARADE | By Rachel Cusk | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 198 pp. | $27