Novelist Rachel Cusk at home in the United Kingdom (Jeff Morgan 06/Alamy Stock Photo)

Reading a Rachel Cusk novel is like watching a recording of your everyday life, with all your subtly unflattering habits, traits, and actions. A conversation with your seatmate on a plane reveals that you manipulate your family like items on an Excel sheet. A lunch meeting about a potential business partnership discloses that people only matter to you if you profit from them. No one at your get-together of acquaintances reacts when a woman admits she abuses her dog.

These are references to scenes from Cusk’s acclaimed Outline trilogy (2014–18), novels driven by a series of exchanges that Faye, the mostly mute narrator, has with those she encounters. Her conversations read more like monologues, the characters talking at her like she’s on a bad date. These quasi-vignettes replace a traditional narrative arc. The characters don’t have rich inner lives, and they’re largely indistinguishable, different only in the ways that their greed, narcissism, and self-centeredness manifest. As a narrator, Faye is deadpan, sometimes even cruel; she allows no wrongdoing, misstep, or embarrassment to go unnoticed. The trilogy doesn’t try to console or comfort, but reveals the ugliness of our everyday lives—an ugliness that leads us not to reflect on our failures but instead to pass judgment on others. Do we look for ugliness in others to make ourselves feel better about our own limitations? The Outline trilogy encouraged me to tease out my own prejudices about the nature of perception and forced me to confront the self-centeredness that can sometimes stand in the way of my own relationships.

These preoccupations persist in Cusk’s most recent novel, Parade. Its four discrete sections are connected only through a collection of artists named “G” and switch between first- and third-person perspectives. The effect is that Parade feels more like an essay than a novel. It opens with “The Stuntman,” in which we learn about a male painter who, after having his work “brutally criticised” early in his career, begins to paint scenes upside down. We also meet a woman who is haunted by a random anonymous attack she endured on the street. Later, she visits the exhibition of the Black artist G, and then she and her husband see the works of the female sculptor G, who also features in “The Diver.” In that chapter, the lead gallerist witnesses a suicide at the show’s opening, and turns this experience into fodder for conversation about the perils of her and her dinner companions’ own lives. This suicide hovers in the background of the gallery opening and of the novel as a whole, like Septimus Smith’s suicide in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In “The Midwife,” a successful female painter G is driven by shame, in part because her husband, an amateur photographer whose photos of their daughter adorn their home, disapproves of her work—he finds it “morally repellent”—but not the money it earns. The final section, “The Spy,” presents a filmmaker who, seeking detachment from his family and his upbringing, produces films under a pseudonym and wonders whether the death of his parents will provide him the resolve he seeks.

In each section characters navigate seeing and being seen; attention is unilateral rather than reciprocal. Some characters are absorbed in their own perceptual orbit, while others seek acknowledgment. “He was looking in at her but she didn’t know he was there,” the first-person narrator in “The Spy,” the final section, observes of a child. “She didn’t care enough to know: he didn’t matter to her. Yet he wanted something, was waiting out there in the dark for something. He wanted her to turn around and see him.” We obviously don’t—and can’t—always notice when we’re being looked at or called upon, but the language in this scene presents a missed encounter as something more typical than not. We fail to care for and regard others. We are oblivious to perspectives other than our own. We believe that we’re at the center of the universe. When something calls us out of this self-enclosed state, can we even answer it?

We believe that we’re at the center of the universe. When something calls us out of this self-enclosed state, can we even answer it?

Cusk also asks this question about our encounters with art. As in the Outline trilogy, where Faye’s observations color in her otherwise scant narrative “I,” each G’s art discloses the artist. At the same time, though, the artists can’t control the prejudices that viewers bring with them or the interpretations and criticisms that result. For Cusk herself, who recently wrote that “autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts,” judgments of her work often turn into judgments of her as a person. In a review of her memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012), for instance, Camilla Long calls Cusk “a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish.” Perhaps part of what Cusk provides in Parade is a reply to those who read her work as purely autofictional, who are unwilling to see anything except what they expect or want to see. Or perhaps the current literary trend toward autofiction is an admission that we always bring ourselves into the equation, that the self is inescapable (both from the creator’s and the receiver’s perspectives) when we encounter art. Perhaps what we instead need to do is reorient our self-perspective and become aware of what preconceptions and perceptual limits we bring with us when we encounter an artwork or a person. As Cusk reminds us in Parade, art exists independently of the artist: “Later [G] saw it simply as another example of the way her painting functioned autonomously, living in her like some organism that had happened to make its home there. It had never failed to sustain itself.”

The characters often find that exiting a self-enclosed state hinges on embracing surprise. What if we let ourselves be struck, not just by art and artists but also the people we encounter? What would it mean to open ourselves to this possibility? To be struck or shocked or surprised is to experience pain, physical or psychological, as one is confronted by one’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Such moments occur throughout Parade. The first-person narrator in “The Stuntman” is literally struck by another person. The gallerist in “The Diver” admits, “But then it struck me…that what happened at the museum today reminded me of nothing so much as a work by G herself.” During a discussion between artists in “The Midwife,” the narrator observes:

Her ability to shock had always been instinctive and unconscious.

 

The painter, only half-joking, asked G whether she was living a double life, and G remembered the evening of the dinner party, when she had suddenly felt her conventionality on humiliating display. The painter had seen it all, she knew, and G wanted to protest that she hadn’t chosen what the painter saw, but the fact was that she had. She had chosen it, had sometimes even forced it to be. What she wanted was for someone to ask her why she had, to see through her as her husband did but from the other side of the mirror.

Like the boy seeking the woman’s attention at the end of “The Spy,” here again what the viewer observes is in tension with what the artist wanted—even though G’s art has opened the possibility for acknowledgment. The painter’s shock is quashed, muted so that no one must confront their own or another’s vulnerability. Again, a connection is broken.

Parade 
Rachel Cusk
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$27 | 208 pp.

Jessica Swoboda works in undergraduate advising in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia and is a contributing editor at The Point.

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