Parade by Rachel Cusk review — like walking over shards of broken glass

Cusk’s unhappiness has taken an impressive range of forms throughout her career, modulating from her cruelly witty early novels about middle-class life, to her brilliantly bitter motherhood memoir, A Life’s Work, in 2001 (“If everyone were to read this book the propagation of the human race would cease,” was one critic’s verdict) to the Outline trilogy, published between 2014 and 2018, a fascinating phoenix-like reinvention after what she referred to as her “creative death”. This came after her divorce memoir, Aftermath (2012), received some bad reviews.

On the evidence of her 12th novel, Parade, her move to the French capital — and the influence of writers like Albert Camus and Marguerite Duras — has simply opened up new, continental dimensions to her misery, which now incorporates ennui, douleur, even a soupçon of nausée à la Sartre. “[How] … did we become so evil?” one man wonders of humans. The narrator states that “to be human was a pitiable, if not incomprehensible fate”. Indeed, most of her characters (or should I say “people”; Cusk stopped believing in character in 2014) brood on the savagery of existence. I have admired, sometimes loved, all of Cusk’s books even as I have found myself recoiling, even laughing, at her hysterical descriptions of unhappiness. Is life really so cold and harsh?

You might imagine Parade is set against a backdrop of genocide, war, poverty, violence. It is instead a series of vignettes about the tortured lives of bourgeois artists, gallerists, critics and curators, many of whom are filled with bitterness about their dying parents. Ostensibly the book spotlights half a dozen 20th-century visual artists whose careers resemble those of Georg Baselitz, Éric Rohmer, Louise Bourgeois, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Norman Lewis and a less discernible figure, a Tracey Eminesque reformed wild child who is trapped inside a luxurious home with a bullying husband. Each of these artists is referred to as “G” with few details of place, time or chronology to pin down the narrative. It’s one of several tactics to destabilise the reader.

In between these abstract portraits of artists we hear from a narrator, who sometimes refers to herself as “I”, but more often “we”, as she recalls scenes from her life, such as a random punch to the head on a Paris street by a female attacker, which leaves her feeling “murdered”, or the dying days of her mother, whom she compares to a “dictator”, as she and her siblings gather round her deathbed, reflecting on her poisonous legacy and their superior parenting.

Most of these episodes can be traced back to Cusk’s own life. Indeed, once you look past Cusk’s games in obscuring and altering real-life figures and events, it becomes clear that she has adopted yet another form — in this case, the artist’s biography — to write a plotless, introspective book about how hard it is being Rachel Cusk.

The influence of writers like Marguerite Duras and Albert Camus has opened up a new world of misery for Rachel Cusk

KURT HUTTON/GETTY IMAGES

Her previous novel, Second Place (2021), suggested that Cusk had become increasingly fascinated by the art world. Her third husband, Siemon Scamell-Katz, is a painter and it feels no coincidence that Parade’s opening, The Stuntman, focuses on the thoughts of an unhappy wife of an artist. “The feeling of everything seeming right but yet being fundamentally wrong was one she powerfully realised: it was her condition, the condition of her sex.”

The wrongness of womanhood is inadvertently captured by the act of inverting the world. One day her husband decides to start painting scenes from life upside down, including his wife, who has long been “imprisoned in the paintings”. She believes this new direction expresses “the closest thing she knew to the mystery and tragedy of her sex”. Cusk imagines the artist’s wife accompanying him on a bleak trip to visit his dying father who has participated in “certain evils”, some of which are on “public record”. Because Cusk never names his crimes, they blur into all the other injuries inflicted by despicable parents in the book.

• 23 best novels: the most colourful and compelling literary fiction

In the second section, The Midwife, the Emin-like female painter finds commercial success with “autobiographical” art that disgusts her parents and her controlling husband. He nevertheless enjoys the profitability of her self-exposure, which only increases her sense of self-loathing. When her young daughter asks why there need to be men, the artist realises she thinks men are superior. “She identified mothers and children with mediocrity. How could that be, when she herself was a mother? Men are great, she answered.” Through the book Cusk draws parallels between the creation of art and the creation of children, as well the creation of negative products, from “shit” to violence.

In the final section, The Spy, the theme of toxic parents gathers force as the narrator confesses the “indifference” that she — and apparently her siblings — have towards the death of their domineering mother. This is interspersed with the account of a male film-maker who maintains an alias so that his parents don’t discover his “naturalistic and poetic” work. He wants “to see without being seen” because he knows that for an artist there is no greater power. Who does this sound like?

Cusk makes her narrator invisible and yet puts herself everywhere. There are at least 15 figures in this book and almost all of them are miserable, angry and resentful of their dying parents. Why do almost none of them have a sense of humour? The only vaguely amusing person is a “fat and lazy” art biographer who can’t keep up her end of conversation until she has some dinner. “Even the most thrilling dialectics on feminism and art, she said, accepting her plate, can’t hold me when I’m hungry.” The only joke is one of the book’s clunkiest lines.

• The best books of 2024 — our critics’ top 12 reads

Cusk has suggested in recent interviews that she would be happier “handing the content over to readers and saying you have to animate it yourself.” I mean, lucky readers? The result is something that is simultaneously cold and histrionic, hermetic and inert, rather like that scene in Being John Malkovich where everyone has John Malkovich’s face only much, much less funny. Being Rachel Cusk doesn’t feel truthful, either, because it denies both humour and hope. Where there are moments of beauty and redemption, they are always connected to the natural world or small children (about whom she is very sentimental) rather than her fellow adult humans, who are depicted as creators of mess and disorder.

I read Parade twice to see what more it could yield. The first time I was overwhelmed by the stench of hate and blame, especially towards parents, the second by the awful reek of self-loathing and self-pity as Cusk strains to find the universal in her narrow realm of experience. Late in the book she even makes a half-hearted stab at blaming everything on “repellent” capitalism, which has corrupted her mother. But by this point we have stopped trusting in her world view.

The experience of reading Parade is like walking over shards of broken glass, a phrase that is used in the book’s final line. It doesn’t feel bracing, it feels unnecessary. By the final page I was reminded of that most loathsome of British phrases, one I’ve never had cause to utter until now: Cheer up, love, it might never happen.
Parade by Rachel Cusk (Faber, £16.99, pp208). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members