Rachel Cusk has written a novel which ends with the word ‘beginning.’ She has written a novel in which every major character goes by the same name. She has written a novel that sounds the same when describing sickness and health, in which the mourning of death is registered in the same tone as the celebration of life. She has written a novel in which artists make art of each other and then critique it; a novel of ideas in which ideas have no authority; a city novel in which the city is never named; a realist novel which enlists whole battalions against realism.
Cusk is ever unpredictable; the reviews of her are not. A way of writing about her has developed — Rachel Cusk is upending the novel, Rachel Cusk is reimagining narrative, Rachel Cusk is doing away with character — that manages to turn originality into formula. Reading Cusk’s reviews, it is as though with each new novel she is merely issuing out notes on a form. Reading Cusk — most especially in her newest novel, Parade — it is clear that her project is a grander one.
Cusk began her writing career with Saving Agnes in 1993; in 2003, Granta marked her as one of its Best Young British Novelists. Granta and Cusk are a match: not just by virtue of the white-faced designs intent to not let literature forget the aesthetics of the book, but in the sense of contributing to British literature while on the outs with it. It was in Granta’s third issue, titled The End of the English Novel (1980), that then-editor Bill Buford declared “today’s British novel is neither remarkable nor interesting…does not startle, does not surprise.”
If there was anxiety over fiction’s fate then, today we have something like acquiescence: literature persists with its ears shut to the world, which has long stopped listening. What were once existential threats now have the character of incontrovertible, irrevocable facts — the ailing of the reading public, the dwindling of the novel against other forms of giving one’s attention, the general doom and gloom. Yet, every now and then in our twenty-first century, a piece of writing arrives to remind us of the novel’s promise, of why we first came to it and why we come to it still. A piece of writing that sharpens and re-assembles that “we,” reintroducing its great many members to each other. A piece of writing which asks us new questions (or returns us to the old ones) and demands that we answer.
What her reviewers have received as avant-garde experimentalism might be put another way: Cusk’s relationship to the English language is (has been) an adversarial one. No less to England itself. “I don’t think I will ever write anything ever again in which a person speaks [English] as a native speaker,” she told The Paris Review in 2020.
She did more: she quit with England altogether. Parade’s every line proclaims her destination: nowhere in the novel is Paris named, yet everywhere is the trace of the French revolution that has occurred within its writer. It is the historic city of emigré artists that could impel a passage like:
For several weeks we stayed in one place after another, never unpacking our suitcases. We were natives neither of the city, nor of the country itself, nor of its language: the lady’s apartment had been like a boat, and now we were cast into the sea.
For that has been the effect of Cusk’s relocation: Parade opens with the artist G (the first, male G, the painter — not to be confused with the many Gs, also artists, who follow) beginning to paint upside down so as “to make sense of his time and place in history.” Parade is Cusk finding her new place in language too. Parade’s themes are grand, unrestrained: the violence of life under capitalism, the war between reality and the attempt to represent it, the dissolution of the self; the novel’s prose is sparse, transparent, almost unfeeling. In what undertaking French has done to Cusk’s prose, there is an echo of Beckett, who felt in himself le besoin d’être mal armé.
G paints a series of slender birch trees in the sunlight, “the demented calmness and innocence of [which seem] to suggest the possibility of madness as a kind of shelter.” Later, as the narrative shifts (as it does, without announcement nor signal, at each paragraph break) a bourgeois couple strolls into a park, finding “a canopy so large that it formed a sort of shelter;” looking at it, the wife, narrating, “thought often of the home we had left, our own home, left of our own volition.” There are only kinds of shelters, sorts of shelter — Cusk, who has flung herself out of place, out of language, who has cast herself into the sea, has embarked now on her voyage to whatever shelter she can find.
And she has found more than shelter: she has found company. She says she learned French, in the main, by reading French writers in French; none clung to her more than Marguerite Duras. But it has baggage, the French cannon; her acquisition has certainly been more than linguistic. She has made herself l’étranger; with estrangement, being on the outside, comes marginality, or what a tradition of French thinkers have termed ‘alterity.’ For Emmanuel Lévinas, alterity was the beginning of ethical obligation; for Claude Levi-Strauss — traveller par excellence — inquiry began with immigration, with being forced “to look at [social reality] simultaneously from within, where [one] believes [oneself] to be, and from without, where [one] is placed.”
Parade pays close attention to woman’s situation (“She could have refused, but the moral logic of her situation didn’t allow it,” G’s wife finds), sounding an echo of de Beauvoir, who wrote Le Deuxième Sexe out of the existentialist conviction that “every concrete human being is always uniquely situated.” The first G’s act of inversion brings him to a place where “the question of what a human being actually was had never seemed so unanswerable.’ Parade, where protagonists melt into each other, troubles the standing of the individual subject as the anchoring point of the realist novel, as though to gesture towards Foucault, who wagered that there would come a time when “man” as such “would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” It is not a question of whom Cusk has or has not read. It is about the tradition she has inherited, and in which she has placed herself.
Parade is Cusk wrestling; finding again and again that “there is always this obligation, this fight to find a way out of obscurity.” In that fight, it is a novel that has found language wanting. Cusk takes recourse to the other arts — the starkest truths in the writing are disclosed by painters. She has fled to the visual, but others before her took other exits: for Sartre, the road out of language’s inadequacy led to the political: “A day comes when the pen is forced to stop, and the writer must take up arms.”
Which is to say that Parade is capacious; perhaps even transcendent. It is a novel that at every juncture weighs itself against the world beyond it: “I find something deathly in the interference of illusion with reality.” And yet Parade’s most illuminating depiction is Cusk; for, “the painter is also the subject.”
Of G — black, male painter — Cusk writes, “his neighbourhood later became his subject because it was the subject that was given to him” and what comes next will bear further witness to what France has bequeathed Cusk. For John Berger, another Brit who crossed the English channel eastward, Paris and France gave a vision of the artist as emigré that he took to A Painter of our Time and then to G, which bears more than a nominal resemblance to Parade. Such a break can be found in a long list of wandering writers past for whom Paris has been decisive: Turgenev, Cortázar, Baldwin…
From this, her first novel as emigré, it is clear that a remaking has occurred in Rachel Cusk. She is in the country of committed literature, and in her own way she is enlisting: “Art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word,” she writes. Her remaking is one which has necessitated a reassessment of the novel as a form. Parade is no great reinvention of the realist novel — experimentalism for its own sake is not Cusk’s ambition. What she is interested in — what she wants us to be interested in — is making different claims on the realist novel, on the humanist novel, asking: what can the novel do for us, now? What ought the novel to be doing for us, now?
Parade signals a beginning: for Cusk, for all who have a stake in literature and its health. It is a novel which ventures beyond language to ask more of language. Cusk’s vital message is that the act of reproducing the novel as we know and expect it falters before the needs of our time; as it stands, society is having the last word. So long as this is so, she is not content. She needs to reinvent — formally, linguistically, structurally — because as Walter Benjamin, Paris’s great chronicler, wrote, “all the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”
Cusk has begun a parade of her own and she is inviting others to march on. In which general direction? “There [are] only the paintings themselves in which to look for clues.”
2025