Parade

By Rachel Cusk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

Rachel Cusk’s inexplicable career continues with her new whatever-the-hell, Parade, which starts with the story of a loutish, misogynistic artist she calls simply G., who at one point decides to start painting things – landscapes, items, people – upside down. As shouldn’t need specifying in the 21st century, he also draws his wife upside down and additionally makes her homely – and these new patriarchy paintings are, of course, a huge hit with the buying public. 

But this G isn’t the only G in the book nor the only artist-G, who may or may not be (or end up being) (or once have been) the put-upon wife of the other artist-G. For all that this numbing sophistry is holding the attention of the reader, it’s entirely possible that the Bee Gees also put in an appearance. 

Cusk’s narrative, such as it is, certainly wouldn’t care. There’s no plot here, just stories sprinkled with character-sketches like the mysterious noble-savage Mollo or his resentful wife, the various G-spouses and G-offspring, and, swamping everything else, a whole lot of Rachel Cusk. She’s there at every turn, ready to take what would otherwise have been a scene in a novel and turn it into a Brecht monologue:

She asked us whether we had found the path down to the sea, and we told her about the abandoned house we had seen, with its ghastly air of habitation, She told us that it had belonged to the same family for many years but now the old parents had died and the children wanted to sell it. They had all left the island as soon as they could, she said, and never came back here, and their idea was to sell the house and land to a developer who might build a hotel. The position and the view of the sea were so exceptional that they’d put it on the market for a very high price, but each time a developer was interested the council rejected their application. The children are very angry, she saie, but they are also very stubborn. They’ve decided to wait for their money because they believe that one day, when there are different people on the council, the application will be approved, They haven’t touched the house, she said, which in their scheme would be demolished, and have left all their parents’ things exactly as they were when they died. Their clothes are still in the cupboards and their toothbrushes in the bathroom and their packets of food on the shelves, and I often think about how those old people would feel, she said, to discover they had been left exposed in that way. 

Parade has pages and pages and pages of this kind of faux-Jamesian sheep dip. There’s no dialogue, only the suggestion of it. There are no characters, just speaking roles. There are no dramatic arcs, just a very palpable recurrence of this author’s ideological stance that things like dialogue, characters, plot, and drama are the contemptible relics of a shameful literary inheritance. “Good Lord,” you can practically hear the text saying, “you’re not actually expecting good dialogues and interesting characters, are you? In 2024? Like in The Maltese Eagle, or something? LOL.”

Instead, as noted, readers get pages and pages and pages of this:

I know a lot of women who assume that the men they live with will be financially responsible for them, Julia said. It’s true that usually they have children, and most of them talk about it as a deal they made at the beginning, but the deal is always the same, that the man will earn the money while the woman allows her career and her ambitions to take second place. Sometimes I have been jealous of these women, she said, because I live without a partner and support myself and my daughter, and to be able to live your life without considering every action in light of practical necessity seems to me an almost unacceptable privilege. At other times I see that the absence of necessity weakens their ambitions, and that they allow themselves to become unprepared to survive alone. Their lives are so gendered, she said, it is almost as if they trust gender more than anything else to tell them how to live.

No idea who Julia really is (we never come any closer to her or anybody else in the book than the arm’s length of these wads of fiberglass insulation), no idea what any of this means to her, certainly no quotation marks, no pacing, no give-and-take, no invitation to the reader to enjoy what they’re reading.

No invitation to the reader to enjoy what they’re reading, one suspects that’s really the key here. Parade and Cusk’s other books aren’t novels, they’re sessions in an ongoing literary experiment. No doubt there’ll be readers out there who’ll appreciate that, who’ll appreciate Parade’s endless speechifying and near-complete lack of storytelling. After all, as Mollo’s long-suffering wife says, not everyone wants to live like an animal.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News