How Rachel Cusk’s 12th novel Parade pushes fiction’s boundaries

As a massive fan of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, I was not expecting to need a spreadsheet to keep track of all the moving parts in her latest novel. Parade lives up to its title,
with a pageant of artists with the same name, a panoply of narrative points of view and a potpourri of recurring motifs. It’s a novel designed to get the reader off balance, even compared to Cusk’s previous work.

With Outline and its siblings, Transit and Kudos, published between 2014 and 2018, Cusk took autofiction to its illogical conclusion and removed most aspects of the writer-narrator from the books. What’s left is largely monologues from others: journalists, writing teachers and students, airplane neighbours, billionaires and builders. Yet the narrator who hears these words remains present, filtering and organising everything on the page, and ultimately looms as the largest presence, even in the absence of biographical information.

Cusk followed this with Second Place, an only slightly more conventional novel, in which a female narrator, M, relates the turbulent time a painter, dubbed L, came to stay on her family’s property.

In Parade, her 12th novel, the author not only strips the names from characters and identities from narrators, but presents a globetrotting, speechy novel without place names or quotation marks. It’s almost as if Cusk is playing strip poker with her novels, and honestly, I am here for it.

In the first of four distinct sections, “The Stuntman”, Cusk alternates a third-person account of a male artist, referred to only as G, who begins to paint upside down, with sections from a female first-person narrator who is living in an unnamed foreign city that nevertheless resembles Paris (where Cusk has lived since quitting Britain post-Brexit). This narrator is assaulted by a stranger in a cafe, sees an exhibition from a female sculptor, reads about a late 19th-century female painter, and recalls the paintings of a black male artist. All these are called G.

The second section, “The Midwife”, alternates a third-person account of a female painter – G – and her monstrous husband with a first-person plural account of a couple, or maybe an entire family, who go on multiple holidays to Mollo’s farm on an unnamed island in an unnamed country.

The third section, “The Diver”, is one continuous piece, which starts again in the first-person plural (“We continued on foot … We came to a narrow passageway …”) but otherwise feels as if it could have been part of the Outline trilogy. Characters gather at a bar to commiserate after a landmark exhibition of the female artist G’s work goes horribly awry when a man commits suicide. The museum director is leaving to live with her daughter on an island that sounds a little like Mollo’s, which has thrown her ex-husband into a homicidal rage.

Finally, “The Spy” features a third-person account of a male writer-turned-film-maker, G, and another first-person plural account of a family dealing with a dying mother. The film-maker G feels like the closest proxy of all the Gs to Cusk herself: “When they brought out something new, it was compared to the last thing they had done; it was praised or criticised on that basis; a familiarity, a form of ownership had been established that permitted judgment. Why was it impossible to create without identity? Why did a work need to be identified with a person, when it was just as much the product of shared experience and history?”

Conversely, the sections about “our mother” feel the least like Cusk. There’s a fable-like quality that at times verges on comic (“Suddenly we could not tolerate capitalism”).

The gulf between the two narrative modes in Parade’s final section might signal a forking path for Cusk’s future pursuits: continue to suffer the slings and arrows of comparisons with earlier work and the known facts of her life, or take up new and unusual arms against her particular sea of troubles: gender, relationships, creation, death.

Though it will be interesting to see the wider response to Parade from critics and fans, the most telling response will be what, and how, Cusk chooses to write next.

Parade by Rachel Cusk (Faber, $36.99) is out now.