Parade by Rachel Cusk review – cold visions of chaos

The world is turned upside down in an experimental novel about art, observation and making stories

Rachel Cusk’s repeated attempts to exterminate the novel while still writing one are genuinely impressive. Ten years ago, frustrated by what she called the ridiculous act of “making up John and Jane”, she wrote Outline, followed by Transit and Kudos, a compelling trilogy in which the narrator, whose biographical circumstances seem to match Cusk’s, reveals almost nothing about her life or feelings, and instead recounts the monologues of people she encounters. In an interview in 2018, after the publication of Kudos, Cusk told the New Yorker:“I don’t think character exists any more.” She then wrote Second Place, about a detached, Cusk-like character who opens her glorious marshland home to a destructive artist. And now there’s Parade, an icy thought experiment in which an unnamed narrator, whose scant biographical details map Cusk’s, moves between nameless European cities, visiting exhibitions and thinking about artists.

The narrator’s thoughts are woven with stories about various artists, all called “G”. Among them is G, the famous painter who decides to represent the world upside down (he is surely based on the German artist Georg Baselitz). There’s G, the major artist with a wild past, now trapped unhappily in marriage and motherhood and haunted by shame; and G the film-maker, who discovers that people are often “baffled or angered” by his work: instead of the “strange authority of the camera’s prying eye”, he offers neutrality, an “absence of what might be called leadership”. The narrator, meanwhile, reveals almost nothing about herself. This artistic absence of “leadership” is central to Parade.