One morning, as she’s walking along a quiet, sunny street, a woman—the wife of an artist, G, newly famous for painting his subjects, and her, upside down, like Georg Baselitz—is attacked by a female mugger. In shock, she imagines her assailant looking back at her ravaged body as if admiring a work of art.
This random act of violence catapults us into Rachel Cusk’s unconventional new novel, Parade. With explicit, searing testimony about the perils of being a woman, mother, wife, and artist, Cusk, who was herself once mugged and faced a lingering trauma, here drills down so deep it hurts: Parade is hot to the touch, “a dark twin,” as she characterizes the mugger, of her other works.
Even those who are fans of the British writer’s memoirs, essays, and novels, which often revolve around power and who has it, may be daunted by this conceptual work of four interlinked vignettes. Told from multiple vantage points, the stories are united nevertheless by a pervasive violence that threatens at every turn.
Cusk, considered one of our most formidable novelists, now resides in Paris with her third husband, a conceptual artist, seemingly far from the U.K. turmoil (two ex-husbands, single parenthood, some difficult reviews) that once bedeviled her. And yet, Parade’s protagonists, who also displace themselves, make plain that you can run but you can’t hide.
With explicit, searing testimony about the perils of being a woman, mother, wife, and artist, Rachel Cusk drills down so deep it hurts.
The (nameless) wife thinks G has captured the essence of the oppressed female condition in depicting her upside down. What had become of “The Stuntman” (as this first section is titled), she wonders after the mugging upends her—the alternate self who could confront risk? As the couple seek a permanent home and travel to see family and art, much is filtered through this lens of pernicious gender imbalance.
In the next section, “The Midwife,” G—shape-shifting suddenly to a female, Louise Bourgeois–like sculptor—is filled with shame but tired of running and hiding. (Bourgeois is known for her phallic sculptures and giant spiders called “Maman.”) G’s wild years may be behind her, but her angry, feminist art is still like an unruly child who “doesn’t always cooperate or mind its manners.” Yet G somehow clings to her husband’s disapproval, “like a dog slinking back to a cruel master.”
What’s more, in this vignette art and culture have been corrupted by entertainment: dealers are opaque midwives; museums are sometimes “like … church[es]” and sometimes “like … the aftermath of a car crash.”
Besides Baselitz and Bourgeois, in other passages, aspects of artists Paula Modersohn-Becker (known for her unflinching pregnancy self-portraits) and Norman Lewis (known for his haunting rendering of the Black experience) also inhabit the letter G. Though this device further complicates Cusk’s already wily narrative, it amplifies her harsh perspectives on art and gender, which seemingly do not allow for any feminist gains: males are powerful but fearful; females are victims or renegades who must barricade themselves away from family behind locked doors to get any creative work done.
In “The Diver,” at the start of a long-planned conference about G’s (Bourgeois’s) work, a man jumps to his death in a museum atrium. The curators and director meet off-site in shock and solidarity to try to make sense of what happened. Did seeing all of G’s angry art push the man to suicide? The director admits she has already handed in her resignation and plans to escape with her children to an island far away from her ex-husband. Perhaps the only solution is to give up on art—and men.
In the final section, “The Spy,” an evil mother is dying—and her children don’t give a damn. Her son, a filmmaker—G’s last incarnation—even writes under a pseudonym so his mother won’t learn of his accomplishments. Thus invisible, like a spy, he has freedom. His films reveal women to be the “true creators,” but simultaneously “slaves and henchmen.” His gay brother has instead chosen to come out—wounding their mother in a different way. But only upon her death are her children really able to live.
I’m afraid no drum majorettes or marching bands are here to lead the way in wrapping our heads around Parade: stuntmen, midwives, divers, and spies are instead the rogues’ gallery offering clues to Cusk’s intentions. Is she a mugger, then, pausing to admire her handiwork as we scramble to wrangle her serpentine tales right side up?
Yet, if you’re interested in how artists perceive the world and make something new of it, the novel offers insights into the messy cauldron of creativity.
Patricia Zohn has contributed to numerous publications, including Wallpaper, Artnet, the Huffington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times
