Rachel Cusk’s extraordinary novel, Parade, did not make the Booker Prize longlist. I was nonplussed but resigned to the judges’ decision: sometimes they choose experimental novels, other times they settle for the accessible. Cusk’s angular, deceptively static narrative explores the work of the artist G, who appears in many incarnations, sometimes male, sometimes female.
This is certainly a challenging book. A reviewer at NPR called it pretentious, and a vlogger sponsored by the Booker Prize last year said it was the book he most hoped would not make the 2024 longlist.
I have a different perspective. It is one of the most beautiful novels I’ve read this year. Cusk understands art and knows or imagines the creators: her descriptions of paintings and techniques are clear and precise, while the brief personal interactions between artist and spouse, or artist and children, tend to be difficult and murky.
The segment about the first G centers on a series of upside-down paintings. People wonder whether he painted them that way or simply inverted them. Women especially find them disturbing. When G’s wife sees the paintings, she feels that she has been hit. She observes, “The feeling of everything seeming right yet being fundamentally wrong was one she powerfully recognized: it was her condition, the condition of her sex.” A female novelist is also upset: she is “struck as though by lightning.” It is not surprising that G, whose work has such power over or against women, believes that women can’t be artists.
One way or another, women tend to be hit or struck. In another segment, a woman is literally hit by a strange, possibly mad woman on the street. “It occurred to me in the time that followed that I had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive and I found that I could associate this death-in-life with other events and experiences, most of which were consequences in one way or another of my biological femininity.”
There are many different G’s: a 19th-century woman who dies in childbirth; a Black man who paints a cathedral on a small scale to emphasize marginality; a woman artist isolated from her daughter by the architecture of her studio, designed by a man, and by her husband, who jealously guards their daughter from her.
The woman artist has a burden: she has autonomy in the studio, but must sustain relationships, particularly with her children. Her children are fascinated, if neglected, but G’s art has the power to disturb people even from the grave. At a posthumous exhibition of G’s paintings, a man commits suicide. The director believes the art was beside the point, that he had planned the suicide and happened to look at the art because it was there.
But then it struck me, she said, that what happened today reminded me of nothing so much as a work by G herself. The power of disturbance in G’s work, she said, seems linked to the actual disturbances or reality such as the one we witnessed, but I haven’t yet been able to formulate any thoughts about that link.
And we learn that this catastrophe affected her personally as well as professionally, because it was her last public exhibition before she retired. She stood beside the man before he hurtled himself over the railings. So she is struck, or hit, not a victim of her profession but possibly of G’s art, even though she denies it.
What struck me most about this incident was the idle chat about the suicide himself. Of course she and her colleagues did not know the man, but there is no sympathy, no emotion.
There is much to think about in Parade. For one thing, the creation of art itself takes place outside of the museum. And when it is there, what effect does it have? So many different possibilities in Cusk’s novel.