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
