The logical terminus of Rachel Cusk’s journey in selfhood
PARADE RACHEL CUSK 208pp. Faber. £16.99.
“I seem to be doing a lot of things these days that are out of character”, says Thomas, an ex-teacher we encounter, briefly, midway through Rachel Cusk’s fragmentary, elusive, ambiguously semi-autobiographical new novel. “I am perhaps coming out of character ... like an actor does.” In many respects Parade represents a doublingdown on the “annihilated perspective” Cusk has, by her own account, been pursuing as a narratorial principle since the first instalment in her Outline trilogy. In Outline (2014), as in its follow-up, Transit (2016), and to a lesser extent in the third book, Kudos (2018), Cusk’s narrator Faye is artfully selfabnegating, forgoing much agency or sense of herself as perceived from the outside – in each novel, her name is mentioned only once – in favour of a somewhat glassy receptiveness. She listens, or, rather, gives her interlocutors rope.
Second Place (2021), Cusk’s first post-Outline novel, concerns the relationship between a writer and a portraitist referred to only as M and L; M is recounting the events cursorily described in the story to a character called Jeffers, who remains all but opaque to us. This minimalist approach is further developed in Parade, where Thomas hands in his notice briefly after the death of his father. “With him gone, I immediately found that I no longer needed to play the part of myself. Perhaps I no longer need to exist at all.” The same might be said of Parade’s entire cast of loosely interconnected characters, if they can be called characters: without even the presiding, if impassive, narratorial consciousness of a Faye-like figure, Thomas et al function primarily as vessels for Cusk’s metaphysics, glancing, interchangeable gestures at the illusion of stable identity.
Parade is composed of four long chapters, each (with the exception of the third chapter, “The Diver”) composed in turn of alternating and faintly corresponding narratives, but all, to varying degrees, relating to one or more of several artists known solely, and uniformly, as “G”. In one strand of Cusk’s first chapter, “The Stuntman”, G is a male artist who begins to paint upside-down, thereby, according to his wife, inadvertently expressing “something disturbing about the female condition”. In another, G is a female sculptor of wispy floating figures, aimed at washing the human form “clean of the violence of gender”. In another still, G is a Black male artist whose work only gains recognition after his death, when he is exhibited alongside “certain female contemporaries, as though marginality were itself an identity, inalterable and therefore situate
