A novel that commands and demands your attention. Clear your mind, get ready to concentrate, and follow along as you encounter a series of Gs and explore themes of creation, gender, ambition, violence, motherhood, marriage.

Like a work of art hanging in a gallery, Parade invites you to take a close look and feel (and interpret as you wish).

Thank you very much to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

Rachel Cusk continues to deconstruct the traditional form of a novel, daring the reader to regard this collection as a single work unified by explorations of art in many forms. The central characters are not necessarily the artists, or their work, but those surrounding or attendant to them. The effect of love, either its reality or its lack, is paramount, even that between parent and child. A masterwork.

In 2018 Rachel Cusk famously noted “I don’t think character exists anymore.” In Parade, she explores the multitudes of identity and myriad forms artists take in their lives and in the world. In a painfully short, dizzyingly beautiful episodic novel, Cusk again and again proves to be a master of her craft and a truly singular voice in contemporary fiction, A stunning achievement.

It’s hard to claim that Parade is a novel. It’s part essay, part novel, part semi-autobiography (she draws from some real life experiences) and thoroughly non-conventional and experimental. The one thing I can say about the book is that it is not one to be lightly approached and is probably not very accessible to the average reader. For anyone who has read her previous works, you already know what you’re getting into when you purchase one of her books. For those new to the author, this is not the sort of book you pick up for a casual, plot-driven easy read.

The book is hard to adequately capture in a brief book review. The themes are various and rather complicated. This is a book about art (in various forms) and creation, identity and motherhood, truth and reality, and gender and the female artistic experience.

Parade is broken into 4 chapters or sections. Sections 1, 2, and 4 are told with alternating narratives. Chapter 3 is a single narrative and seemingly stand alone story about a dinner party where the various parties discuss art, gender, and the condition of the female artist. For me, chapters 1 and 4 contain large chunks that read more like a blend of philosophical musings, art history, and feminist essays than a traditional novel. They require that you pay attention and I mean PAY ATTENTION. I learned (after the fact) that the first section was based on a lecture she gave and a version was subsequently published as a standalone New Yorker piece..

Each section is connected to others in theme or content but the narrators and artists at the center of the narratives are different despite almost all of them being given the name of “G”. The reader is never quite sure who is “G” although those who have done their research have been quick to make links to real artists. Art in all its forms are tackled. I had to do significant research to learn about the inspirations behind several of these “G”s. Section one includes the stories of a male painter (of course named G) who others have identified at George Baselitz and a female sculptor (also named G) who draws inspiration from Loiuse Bourgeois (see the video below about her work to get a flavor why why Cusk uses her as one of the many inspirations for this novel).

The final section was published as a piece in Harper’s Magazine and thus returns to a format similar to the first section – blend of essay and fictionalized accounts.

Admittedly, I have the attentional capacity of a squirrel and these sorts of experimental books are often challenging for me. I read the first section full of rage at the author for making me work so hard. I then re-evaluated my approach to the book and slowed down my pace and added research to my reading — I looked up the artists referenced, I watched videos of their lives and works and I paused after each section to reflect on what I had read. And there are so many gems in this book. Cusk is clearly a brilliantly intelligent writer and she is challenging to read (I do actually have an advanced degree, just not in literature or art).

Once I had changed my approach to this book (and I should have learned by now since I’ve read her other work and had similar reactions), I felt greatly impacted. Some of her reflections on motherhood and the links between motherhood, creation, and identity were fascinating and will likely stay with me for some time. The day before I had finished the novel I had gone to lunch with a friend and we discussed the decision to have children (she decided not have children and I have a daughter). So I related to Cusk’s reflections on motherhood and the complexity of feelings related to motherhood (both being a mother and having a mother), self and professional identify, in a way that felt very personal.

So, ultimately it’s hard to review this book. I think it’s fascinating, beautifully written, and dazzlingly brilliant, but it’s also not very accessible to the average reader. The sorts of readers who will enjoy this novel are those who like experimental work, those who are have the time and intellectual interest in art, feminism, psychology of art, motherhood, and philosophy. I loved it but I also had moments of hatred and resentment because she put me through the wringer trying to understand the book and I left it feeling like I understood about 25% of what she was trying to convey. If you like Rachel Cusk, you will love this book. If you are looking for a fast-paced, plot driving novel, you will hate it. If you are a novice to the art world, you will likely need to do some research to fully benefit from reading this.

i do love a bit of Rachel Cusk. Cusk at her best is when you're a fly on the wall, listening to conversations and honestly, realising people suck. they do bad things, or at least don't care about others, or maybe its someone needing to vent and figure themselves out. you often get both sides in her stories.

i liked majority of Parade, the parts I felt smart enough to understand. slowing down ad rereading sections still didn't help my noggin comprehend her questions and thoughts, but i may have been a tired reader during this short novel..

I'm looking forward to the interviews and articles on this one. Cusk makes me so curious!

I've been wanting to read Rachel Cusk for a long time. Other than an ill-advised attempt at listening to her work on audio (her prose is much better suited to the page), this is my first time opening one of her books.

She's a beautiful writer, but for me it's the case of the parts being greater than the whole. It just felt like the whole thing never coalesced.

Fascinating, compelling, elliptical, elusive, interrogating art, relationships, motherhood, the lasting effects of twisted mothering, love and violence, the dominance of men in relationships, gender, identity, bodies, racism, stereotypes, life and death. Both wild and tamped down, via the cool intellectual prose, the switching between third person and first, the several different artists (a white male painter, a Black male painter, a female painter/multimedia artist, and a filmmaker) each only referred to as G, the interpretation of their singular works, the interpolation of other stories - a couple who have left their country and are trying to find a place to live, the story of a twisted mother and the terrible legacy of distance that inhabits her grown children, the death of a man in a museum, the punching of a woman by another woman in the street - I can't say I fully understand everything set out in this book, and likely it is a novel that needs to be read more than once to grasp what might have eluded the reader the first time around, but all of it stays in the mind. A brainy book that straddles fiction and dissertation but never leaves people behind.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Netgalley for the ARC.

This continues with the same European liminal style as her outline trilogy-but has a more narrow interrogative focus-looking at what it means to be an artist and a parent (mother) and the conflicts inherent in it. It is a novel not without frustrations-all the artists, regardless of gender are referred to as 'G' and one is frequently unsure as to which cities are being described and there is a real sense of being unanchored. But there are many delights to be found- the conversations that characters have at dinner in the aftermath of a tragedy and the bracing intelligence of the narration ask hard questions of the reader. I found the final section really interesting as it gave the illusion of being the most personal refection on childhood, possibly posing the question of what kind of childhood creates an artist, and it almost felt like the novel has been working up to this sense of revelation the whole time. In some ways it is less a 'novel' than a series of connected vignettes-but no less interesting for that. Definitely for fans of Cusk's earlier works and in a similar vein to Deborah Levy's work.

I’ll admit this book just probably wasn’t my style from the get go, so if it is your style do not let my rating dissuade you.

Parade is a very interesting book that one can’t really refer to as a conventional narrative. This book was highly experimental in its writing and exceedingly melancholy. Whilst the writing was certainly a distinctly beautiful brand of pretentiousness, as someone who has yet to read a purely philosophical novel, going into this I did struggle with maintaining my full attention when reading. That said this is the type of book that I may be prevailed upon to try again in the future, as the notion of the interconnectedness of people and the exploration of art were compelling, and the nameless natures of the characters made them feel oddly intimate as if in stripping them of identity, it became easier to identify them.

A unique read, that goes beyond the usually maintained borders of fiction, this book contained great prose and philosophical quandaries, however for a mostly narrative driven reader such as myself, it was at times difficult to immerse in.

Cusk's latest work is truly remarkable! It's a profound exploration that delves into complex themes with such depth and breadth that attempting to summarize it feels nearly impossible. Yet, far from being a flaw, this density and intensity speak to the richness of the narrative. It tackles significant subjects like art, reality, identity, and gender with remarkable fluidity.

Critics have discussed its form and structure, which provide coherence amidst the profound inquiries within. The narrative employs recurring imagery and motifs, such as mirrors and reflections, to underscore themes of self-division and unity. The evolution from 'I' to 'we' mirrors this exploration of self and gender, offering a thought-provoking journey.

Moreover, Cusk challenges traditional novel conventions by questioning the role of the narrator and experimenting with form. Incorporating elements from her own essays on art and feminism, she blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, offering a critical examination of societal norms and emotional commodification.

The book's wide array of intertexts invites readers to bring their own perspectives, adding layers of interpretation. Of particular note is the exploration of shame, echoing themes found in the works of Annie Ernaux.

This is not a book to be taken lightly—it demands careful attention. However, for me, it represents Cusk's finest work yet, building upon her previous achievements with newfound clarity and purpose. It's an exciting glimpse into her evolving literary journey.

Special thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing an advance copy via NetGalley.

Obviously, Rachel Cusk is smarter and more sophisticated than I am, and despite the fact that I am always struck by how wonderfully constructed her sentences are, I’ve only ever given one of her novels (Second Place) more than three stars: the wonderful sentences stack up and up into something that whooshes right over my head. Because Parade is primarily about art and artists, I’ll use the analogy that I much prefer Impressionism to Realism (in both painting and literature), and while I might appreciate elements of Abstract art on an intellectual level, it doesn’t speak to my soul; and what Cusk is doing in her work to “disturb and define the novel” strikes me as closest to the Abstract. This novel that reads like a series of essays or vignettes — a shifting parade of artists, all named “G” — repeats themes of doubling and mirroring, death and violence, having children and losing parents, and it all seems to add up to a commentary on gender and artmaking — and I say “seems” because coming right out with a point seems to be beside the point (which is not a fatal flaw, just hard for me to connect with). As an intellectual exercise, I am enlarged for having picked this up, but when it comes down to taste, this isn’t exactly my thing.

I wish I like the new Cusk more than I did, as art, artists and all the social topics mentioned in the blurb are right up my alley. And its a Cusk!

I felt really detached by the two story strands in each of the short stories (Yes, it is hard for me to see this as a novel), which always involve one (or multiple) artists just called G. G hence is multiple people, making it hard to connect and care.

I think that this book should be read as an experiment following the outline trilogy. But other than the outline trilogy, the story strands don't contour a main character and feel running nowhere.

I am still happy that I read the book, as it shows how Cusk is trying to evolve her style, but to me this stays an experiments, which has not fully succeeded.

Thank you netgalley and Faber for providing me with an advanced reading copy.

Like most novels from Rachel Cusk, it is hard to say exactly what this one is “about”, per se. It is certainly interested in the ways in which seemingly opposing forces - anger and compassion, independence and motherhood, life and death, the past and the present - wrestle with one another. And, while it ostensibly tells several relatively simple stories - an artist suddenly decides to start painting upside down; a woman is randomly attacked while walking down the street in Paris; a family comes to terms with their mother’s death - its narrative is not linear or clear-cut.

Cusk blends art criticism with autofiction, reeling between different points of view, and as a result I found it difficult at first to get into (one of more confusing elements is that lots of the protagonists are referred to by the same initial, "G") but around half-way something seemed to click. Once I began to abandon trying to work out exactly what was going on, and instead just focused on the sorts of ideas and arguments it was attempting to express, a sense of real satisfaction began to emerge: I started to notice common threads connecting each section together, and could piece together the overarching, yet still ambiguous, interests of the text.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for my free e-ARC!

Unsure if Cusk’s writing style has gone completely over my head, or if it simply just isn’t for me! This was my first Cusk and I’ve heard Outline is much more accessible, and might think about picking that up as I’m curious about her work.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. In this book we’re introduced to an artist being identified as G. Or are we being introduced to several artists named G, both male and female? Or is it a single artist who has lived many lives? Always fascinating tales about an artist and the people they surround themselves with.

3 "the banality of affluent suburban feminism" stars !!

Thank you to the author, Netalley, and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux for providing me with an ecopy. I am providing an honest review. This will be released June 2024.

Vignette

J, a fervent Cuskophile and aspiring Cuskologist is feeling elated. Underneath HIS arm is the beloved Outline trilogy as well as the devilish Second Place. He is to meet R at a Viennese cafe for a discussion, a deep and fervent discussion. HE is wearing his favorite lavender scarf and as he enters the cafe he is assaulted by the most heavely scents. Anxiously, he looks around and the bakery is full. Goodness gracious ! There is a painter, a writer, a poet, a sculptor, a film director and a few of each. Mostly white affluent women by their attire and a couple of goateed men that sort of look like women. They look forlorn, ever suffering, put upon. Pouting and grimacing and leering. The waitress comes across to greet me. Are you the doodler G ? You are expected. She loves my lavendar scarf. No no I am J ! The Cuskophile. She grimaces. There are no tables here for you...all are taken by G. The Gs stare. I am meeting R. She points to a small wobbly table. The Gs gasp and grimace. I notice the nametag of the waitress is also G. Phd in aesthestics studying the put upon genius of G.... aaaa i say.
The G next to me states where is Parade ? I don't wish to discuss Parade. A collective gasp. May I have some opera cake. The Gs have all ordered it. Pavlova please....eaten by the Gs. But but....The waitress G sneers....the desserts are for the put upon , oppressed Gs...not for the likes of you. The likes of me? Why yes....but wait you look off white, olive perhaps, and definitely queer, perhaps working class ? If you are nonbinary perhaps I can find you a croissant. Ummm no I am cismale but I would love the croissant. Harrumph say all the Gs even the goateed ones. A spot of tea only...just a spot and out you go....

Sparkling and intelligent prose reveal dated and currently irrelevant manufactured neurosis. Ummm my least favorite R and I hope she moves back to brilliance and effervescence.

The Gs look at me with their misplaced suspicion as I exit with my other beloved books.

Embracing the Mundus Inversus

Reading Parade is like walking over shards of broken glass sunken to and shattered over the bottom of a lake, a venture to approach with caution, not only to avert getting wounded but also not to overlook the polished diamonds among the treacherous slivers. Threading along, I found myself highlighting many sentences, lured by their brilliance or struck by their acuity and provocativeness.

The rarity of love. The omnipresence and pluriformity of violence, oppression and cruelty in human relationships. The longing for versus the fighting against death. The creative drive as a ruthless inner force that propels the artist into mania, if not egotism and abuse. The anxiety for conformity. The impossible impasse of motherhood, inexorably traumatising and wrecking both mother and child. Anger and hatred pervading relationships and burning underneath the surface of innocuous words. The universe of Rachel Cusk might be one abound with art, erudition and tantalizing thought, it is also quite brutal, inhospitable and chilly. Nature is mostly hostile and menacing, even dawn brings no hope but curious devastation, a relentless casting of new light on old failures.

Divided in four sections, the book’s fragmented structure and multiple alternating narrative perspectives, the nameless characters and various locations offer the reader little to hold onto, yet Cusk transfixes the reader to the page, unable to stop watching. Perspectives are not simply shifting but erratic, the narrative seems to explode into a shamanic dance between singular and plural narrators, victims and perpetrators, mothers and children, husbands and wives, artists and their family.

This is not a conventional novel, going beyond simple non-linear storytelling, stitching together biographical cut-outs of lives of (real and maybe also fictitious ) artists as in a miniature Künstlerroman, essayistic reflections on art and artists, thematising writing, creativity, storytelling, freedom, the body, gender, identity, responsibility, motherhood, power dynamics within the family and death. The section ‘The Diver’ echoes the party in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, bringing in its own Septimus Smith; I intuit many more literary allusions (Rilke?) and intertextual references which have escaped me can be found by the patient reader.

A parade of artists – men and women, black people and white people, visual artists as well as writers and directors, all called G, are breaking in (offering a good deal of fun sleuth work for art lovers to identify the artists and their works, Louise Bourgeois’ Maman among them), conjuring up a continuous metamorphosis like in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. On the other hand the namesake G’s render the artists anonymous and hard to differentiate , their individuality merging into one abstract, archetypical Artist. Through their multitude, only distinguishing them in a few strokes, the interchangeability of the G’s acknowledges the artistic credo of one of them (in the section ‘The Spy’), bespeaking the artist’s need to erase the self a to be a good observer (of which I wondered if this is the artistic vision that Cusk takes towards her position as a writer herself):

He began to understand that the discipline of concealment yielded a rare power of observation. The spy sees more clearly and objectively than the others, because he has freed himself from need: the needs of the self in its construction by and participation in experience

While this view defies those artists who are cloak the world in their subjectivity, the aloof stance in its turn is criticized as a criminal luxury, an aesthetic and moral objection to the phenomenon of causation, a running away from an artist’s social and political responsibility:

To conceal identity is to take from the world without paying the costs of self-declaration.

The G’s seem to function as a box of instruments enabling Cusk to dissect the position and role of the artist in both their own work and in the world.

Sometimes Cusk reminds me of a Pythia intoxicated by words, regurgitating the naked truth in fumes of poison and doom. Fortunately she is also showing a dollop of clemency by presenting the grey and imperfect reality of permanent change as the best we can hope for We recognised the ugliness of change; we embraced it, the litter-filled world where truth now lay.

Reading how other reviewers are interconnecting Parade to former work of Rachel Cusk – her essays and novels and especially her The Outline Trilogy: Outline, Transit and Kudos - it was likely unwise to pick this for a first acquaintance with her fiction, nonetheless I would strongly recommend reading Parade, if only out of selfishness, awaiting with bated breath what other readers will unearth from it, particularly on the works of art Rachel Cusk wove into the fabric of her own viscerally celebral piece of art.

3.5, rounded up.

Amongst contemporary novelists I seemingly tend to favor female writers from the UK who stretch the limits of what literature can do: Deborah Levy, Ali Smith, Sarah Moss ... and most recently Rachel Cusk as well, who I feel is perhaps the most impenetrable and murky of these. Her new work is alternately confounding and intriguing, and I always feel after reading her that I have missed a goodly portion of what she has been trying to articulate - and that I should immediately reread her to try to see if I can put it all together. Much of her work depends upon a vast knowledge of both her own biography and at least a rudimentary understanding of contemporary art and philosophy, which I do NOT possess. Thankfully, due to other GR readers, most notably the Fulcher brothers, the heavy lifting on this one has already been done in that regard!

This book is divided into four sections of more or less equal length - the first, and most difficult to penetrate, stands as an overture or preamble to the work as a whole, in which she provides snippets of narrative, some of which are autobiographical in nature (a story of being inexplicably attacked by a woman on the street, which actually happened to Cusk in Paris) with four or five brief tales concerning various artists, all given the nomenclature of 'G'- some of whom are recognizable, others which may or may not be fictional.

Sections 2 and 4 alternate between two narratives, while the 3rd is a self-contained story of a group of people enjoying an alfresco dinner and discussing the aftermath of a suicide that occurred in an art gallery earlier that day, that had been one of the stories alluded to in the first section. These are more recognizable as actual narratives, rather than the more fanciful lectures that constitute other portions of the book, and indeed were published previously as essays. These cover a wide range of topics, but mainly focus on the nature of art itself, and particularly the possibilities and constraints for a female artist, as well as the nature of life and love itself.

Of these, the final section - which alternates two stories - one of yet another G artist, the other of which centers on a first-person narrator who appears to be Cusk herself - and their reactions to the impending deaths of their respective mothers, packed the most impact. Having just gone through the death of my own mother two years ago, this section hit me the hardest and thus tended to be the most winning and relatable for me.

I am still not quite sure what it all adds up to, but I appreciate that Cusk makes me work hard towards an understanding, and stretches me to think outside my normal parameters. I am quite confident that this will attract as many awards and detractors as her previous Booker-nominated Second Place, and I look forward to seeing what other readers can parse from it.

My heartfelt thanks to publishers F S & G and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for this honest review.

“It’s the parade that has confused everything.”

Rachel Cusk’s recent novels have challenged the conventions of the novelistic form (and seemingly the patience of some readers). Her Outline trilogy (Outline, Transit and Kudos) introduced the startling technique of ‘annihilated perspective’. And Second Place was a bravura, almost Oulipan, take on Lorenzo in Taos.

And in both cases, constrained as any reader is, by the expectations of genre, even if the genre is literary fiction, the intent of her books only became clear over time, from discussions amongst readers and interviews with the author (indeed the conceit behind Second Place, which explains much of the novel, still seems to escape most critics).

Which makes me suspect that, four months before publication, Parade has still to reveal its true architecture.

Cusk is known, outside of her novelistic output, for her essays on art, female artists in particular.

The first section of Parade, The Architect, began life as a lecture Cusk gave in Italy (one apparently rather different the expectations of her host) and was then published as a stand-alone piece in the New Yorker, accompanied by an interview with the author.

And it is fascinating to see the small changes that Cusk has made for the novel Parade (my annotations with underlining representing insertions):

“At a certain point in his career the artist <s>D</s><u>G</U>, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down. <S>This is how I imagine it</s>. At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake, but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality. His wife believed that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition, and wondered if it might have repercussions in terms of his success, but the critical response to the upside-down paintings was <u>more</u> enthusiastic <U>than ever</u>, and <s>D</s><u>G</U> was showered with a fresh round of the awards and honours that people seemed disposed to offer him almost no matter what he did.”

The deletion of “this is how I imagine it” removes the explicit acknowledgement of the fictional nature of some of what follows, but thereby also separating the author Cusk from the fictional narrator.

And the switch in the cipher for the artist concerned from D to G might be a clue to the reader that this artist is in fact an imagined/novelistic take on Georg Bazelitz.

Except one key feature in the novel is to have more than one artist named G.

Whereas in the New Yorker we had:
“We went for a weekend to Berlin, where there was an exhibition of the artist Louise Bourgeois’s late fabric works.”

Referring to the 2022 exhibition The Woven Child at the Gropius Bau, where Cusk provided a contribution to the catalogue. The novel now has it:
“We went away for a weekend to another city, to see an exhibition of works by the female sculptor G.”

This continues, describing the work:

“The exhibition occupied the entire top floor of a grand museum, accessed by a broad walkway that circled a vast central atrium. Light cascaded from the glass ceiling down to the marble floor far below. Beyond the open doors of the entrance, where the attendant sat checking tickets, one of G’s characteristic giant cloth forms could be seen hanging in space, suspended from the ceiling – a human form without identity, without face or features. It was genderless, this floating being, returned to a primary innocence that was also tragic, as though in this dream-state of suspension we might find ourselves washed clean of the violence of gender, absolved of its misdemeanours and injustices, its diabolical driving of the story of life. It seemed to lie within the power of this G’s femininity, to unsex the human form.”

Gs that follow include:

“Sometimes the screams reached the window of my room in the new apartment, where I was reading about G, a late-nineteenth-century woman painter dead of childbirth at the age of thirty-one. Her nude self-portraits show her heavily pregnant, her head inclined to meet her own eyes in the image. Can the element of the eternal in the experience of femininity ever be represented as more than an internalised state? G is trying to show herself from the outside, while she experiences the dawning knowledge of her situation and its consequences. She doesn’t entirely know quite what it is she has chosen: she is being led by instinct. To be led by instinct is the pre-eminent freedom attributed to male artists, and to the making of art itself. There is a self-destructive element to that instinct, and to the creative act, but in this case the cards have been dealt out in advance: G is stepping out of a relative safety and into the world of her own illegitimacy.”

Referring to Paula Modersohn-Becker

And

“One day in an exhibition I saw a painting by the Black artist G of a cathedral
[…]
It had struck me as small, for the reason perhaps that its subject was big. By painting a small picture of a cathedral, G appeared to be making a comment about marginality. In the eye of this beholder, the grandiosity of man was thwarted: his products could be no bigger than he was himself. What was absent from the painting was any belief in what the cathedral was. I remembered it as resembling a glowing pile of blackened embers, charged with internal heat: it seemed to belong more to nature than to man. I wondered how this same artist might have painted a mountain. The justice he brought to the cathedral was of a rare kind, was something akin to love, or pity. He would not, perhaps, have pitied a mountain in the same way.”

Norman Wilfred Lewis

But then other Gs in the novel, outside of the first section of the book, I have so far been unable to identify and may perhaps be fictional:

In The Midwife:

“It was well known that G’s early years in the city had been wild. As time went by her circumstances had become more conventional, which everyone except her seemed to regard as a natural progression. Great success had come to her, and with it a husband and child, and money that needed to be converted into material things.”

In The Spy (again the G was initially E when an extract was published in Harpers):

“The mother of the film-maker G did not know who her son was: his name, which had become widely known, was not in fact his real name. He had assumed it so that she should not discover what he did. While she lived she knew nothing of his illustrious career, and even after she died he maintained this alias and the habits of secrecy and disguise that came with it.”

Three sections follow The Stuntman: The Midwife; The Diver; and The Spy. Three of these alternate between the story of one of the Gs, and a present day account of the narrator(s) (not necessarily the same people in each section; and who may or may not be based on Cusk, The Stuntman built around a real incident which befell Cusk in Paris).

The Diver offers a variation on this theme, set after the same exhibition seen in the narrator on The Stuntman, but here a death by suicide from a visitor has interrupted a planned day of events and lectures, and various of those involved meet to discuss what happened and also, intertwined with this, the life of the artist G (the Bourgeois stand in) who several of them knew personally.

The G of The Spy, a film-maker, film-reviewer and novelist also neatly links back to one of Cusk’s own dilemmas:

“His reviews began to attract notice for their striking avoidance of the word ‘I’. The memory of his novel now embarrassed him: his idea of writing had begun to falter. Of all the arts, it was the most resistant to dissociation from the self. A novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone. In the shared economy of language, everything had to be explained; every statement, even the most simple, was a function of personality. He remembered how exposed he had felt as a child, as his mother steadily built a panorama of cause and effect around him. He was publicly identified with everything he did and said, as well as with what he did not do or say. Writing seemed a drastic enlargement of this predicament.”

The novel contains much lyrical and profound writing on art, and in particular the condition of the female artist, echoing Cusk’s non-fictional writing, and indeed strays at times into the essayistic. And I suspect some of its novelistic foundations await excavation.

“We had obligations and responsibilities of our own. We travelled for work. In a northern city, in our free time, we went to a museum. It was late in the day, half an hour before closing, and we decided to see the temporary exhibition that was on display. We were surprised that we knew nothing about the artist but in fact there was nothing to know: he was virtually anonymous. For centuries his work had been mistaken for that of a far more famous artist of the same school, and once the misappropriation had been acknowledged his activities lay too far back in time to be reconstructed. There were only the paintings themselves in which to look for clues. The paintings were interiors and streetscapes. They possessed a great eeriness that was partly the result of their manufacture by an unknown hand and partly that of the strangeness of what they saw. They were often scenes in which apparently nothing was happening and where the basic formality of the captured moment was absent. In one, for instance, a middle-aged woman was sitting alone in an empty room reading a book. The room was full of a bare light but the windows behind her were dark: it was night-time. She was fleshy, well dressed, self-absorbed. This woman was alone in a way that was nearly impossible to represent – it might have been captured, for instance, on a security camera. Immersed in being herself, she was indifferent to how she was seen. This indifference was oddly familiar to us. How had someone observed her in that way, alone?

It was only after several moments that we noticed a face in one of the windows behind her. It was the face of a small child standing outside in the darkness. He was looking in at her but she didn’t know he was there. 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. In another painting of the same room, again at night, there was now a different woman sitting in the chair. She was leaning toward the dark window so that we could only see her back. On the other side of the window there was again the face of the little child alone in the darkness. The woman was waving at the child through the glass, her hand and face almost pressed to it, the chair nearly toppling with her enthusiasm. The child was smiling. We were told that this was the only example in this school of painting of a woman tipped forward in her chair to look through a window. But we had already recognised the rarity of love.”

Pending the verdict of time this didn’t quite live up to Second Place for me, but not did Second Place itself on a first reading, but still another excellent novel from a truly creative author.

The latest novel from the ever provocative, ever boundary pushing Rachel Cusk (each one of whose Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy was Goldsmith shortlisted – the first of those Women’s Prize shortlisted also) and I would say a return to form after the slightly odd and reader-divisive “Second Place” which was Booker longlisted).

I said of that book in my review “As one would expect with Cusk - this is a deep and quotable book, one which teeters somewhere - like much of her writing - on just the right side of the boundary of genius and pretentiousness, but one which occasionally trespasses the boundary as well as making the occasional excursion to the territory of farce.” and I think much of that applies here but without the farce elements.

Like so much of her writing the themes of being a woman and motherhood are fundamental to the novel – and as with Second Place there is a developing theme in her writing of exploring the visual arts where the confrontation between art and the male/female experience (and the underlying current of violence in much of the artistic representation by both male and female authors) is in Cusk’s view more immediate and urgent than in literature.

And like much of her writing the themes and ideas often require a re-read and engagement with other Cuskian-readers to really appreciate what is going on with the book (for example quite how much “Second Place” was effectively a rewrite of “Lorenzo in Taos” and how what explained much of what seemed slightly jarring in the text only became clear to me when my brother engaged with the book in depth, and I think passed many reviewers completely by even then).

So for now consider these as working notes as I try to understand the structure of the novel and its meaning – notes I will revisit much nearer publication.

The book is split into four distinct sections – three of which have two interwoven strands to them.

The Stuntman

The first strand tells the third party story of an artist named G (of which there are many many more to come) famous for his upside down paintings. These are clearly based on those of the artist George Baselitz although the story is otherwise imagined. Through the thoughts of G’s wife we see both how G‘s artistic career is only possible due to her support, but also how she genuinely believes in his work which is “the closest things she knew to the mystery and tragedy of her own sex.” in its inversion of the world.

The second is told in first person and part autobiographical story based on when Cusk was “brained in the street in Paris, completely randomly” by a deranged female attacker. Cusk has said

the difficulty for me as a writer lay in the use of a personal experience that was so anomalous. Generally, I would use myself—as a location—only if the experience seems universal. It took me a long time to figure out the universal in this very singular and personal act. And, in the end, it had to do with the gender of the attacker—I don’t believe I would have found anything to say about being attacked by a man. But I think the sense—indeed, the reality—of being attacked by life, and by the self, is in fact quite general. Once I had confidence in this idea, it seemed legitimate to use what had happened to me, not because it particularly mattered in a personal sense but because it could function as a kind of reference for the things that happen to other people.

The narrator travels to large exhibition by another female sculptor G (the inspiration here is clearly Louise Bourgeois and her spider installation pieces) – the exhibition is abandoned when a spectator commits suicide by deliberately falling to his death from the atrium. Later the narrator sees work by other artist called G – one (based on some quick Googling) Paula Modersohn-Becker and her mother with child photos, the other Normal Lewis and his 1950 painting Cathedral.



The concept of Stuntman is explained as follows:

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. Those female experiences, I now saw, had usually been attributed to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity. Despite having no name or identity of her own, the stuntman was what created both the possibilities and the artificiality of character. But the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares.

The Midwife

The third party strand is about a initially notorious and wild female artist G (I was unable to work out in this case if there was a real life inspiration) who lives with her photographer husband whose specialty is mildly-disturbingly-close ups of their young daughter’s face. Much of the roots of G’s work lies in the “combined authority with neglect” influence of her parents and her reaction to it. Even though she is now successful she still keeps her run-down studio in a dodgy area of the nearby City – but is also conscious that much of her artistic freedom as a woman relies on a Nanny (“her drudge, her alter ego, her shame”)

The first party plural section tells the story of a visit to a remote farm on what seems to be a Greek island. The Midwife is a person on the Island (always a woman) “a community figure” whose job is to “assist with death, rather as a midwife assists with birth” – but using the rather shocking method of a hammer blow (picking up of course on the violence-to-both themes than run through the novel). Further death, particularly of the elderly and mothers, and those that assist at that time becomes a recurring theme in the last section.

The Diver

This is the only single strand section – a group of people involved with the art-exhibition-ending-in-suicide (“The Diver” – other than in the title not otherwise mentioned in the text as such) meet to discuss the impressions the event has made on them and some of their philosophies of life.

The lengthy eloquent and somewhat artificial monologues in which many of them engage in lieu of conversation reminded me of Cusk’s style in her trilogy.

There is also some discussion of G – both her art and some biographical details which in this case did match what I have come to know of Louise Bourgeois’s career (through novels such as ”Now, Now Louison”).

The Spy

The first party plural section features a family coming to terms with the death of their domineering mother.

The third party section has of course another artist G (again one I could not relate to a real artist) who makes naturalistic films. His work too is largely in reaction to his upbringing. Earlier he wrote a novel under an alias (partly due to the notoriety of his brother), and reviews which “attract notice for their striking avoidance of the word “I” (I wondered if this was a nod to Cusk’s ideas of “annihilated perspective”) – largely due to his increasing discomfort with his novel and writing in general, which of “all the arts is the most resistant to disassociation from the self”. His mother too dies in this section linking the two stories.

Earlier in his career he is inspired by the idea of a spy who “sees more clearly and objectively than the others, because he has freed himself from need: the needs of the self in its construction by and participation in experience”.

Overall this is a novel which I think needs a re-read for me, but one I will leave until others have engaged with it (as proved very productive with “Second Place”).