Parade
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Crafted by the exhilarating mind of Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, Parade disturbs and defines the novel
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.
In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. The attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.
When a woman dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.
An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they have inherited different things.
Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender and how we compose ourselves. A writer and a visionary like no other, Rachel Cusk turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Even if you’re familiar with Rachel Cusk’s previous work, like the heady, philosophical Outline trilogy, Parade is a novel best met on its own terms. Barely 200 pages long, it’s divided into four sections, each of which cycles through multiple storylines all centring around an artist called G. But each G is different: a man or a woman, a parent or a child, a painter or a writer, a villain or a victim. And because Cusk is such a thoughtful writer, capable of such startlingly specific moments of beauty and emotional clarity, this absolutely does not feel like homework. You’ll capture the flow sooner than you think, and once you do, Paradebecomes a genuinely fascinating meditation on what it’s like to live with and love an artist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cusk (the Outline trilogy) delivers a stimulating experimental novel about contemporary artists contending with familial and societal constraints. The book comprises four distinct sections. "The Stuntman" focuses on a painter named G, whose work depicts himself and his wife upside down on the canvas, revealing, his wife thinks, "something disturbing about the female condition." In "The Midwife," a female painter also named G leaves behind her "wild" youth to marry and have a daughter with an oppressive husband. Cusk remarks subtly on the "incomprehensible fate" of women such as G by juxtaposing her story with a parallel narrative focused on a defunct utopian community run by a repugnant man and his competent, long-suffering wife. "The Diver" portrays a group of art world professionals discussing the recent derailing of an important exhibition (descriptions of the unnamed artist's work suggest Louise Bourgeois), after a visitor dies by suicide in the museum on opening day. In "The Spy," the rise of a filmmaker named G is juxtaposed with the story of adult siblings visiting their domineering mother at her deathbed, where they consider what they've learned after having children of their own. Though the connections between the sections can feel tenuous, the author's spare approach to character is as sharp as ever. Once again, Cusk offers ranging and resonant perspectives on art, love, and femininity.
