One of the women in Rachel Cusk’s new novel confesses to an ability to shock that is “instinctive and unconscious”. This could double as a description of Cusk herself. To be controversial is second nature to her (think of the articulate effrontery of A Life’s Work, her book about motherhood, or The Last Supper, her fascinating memoir about living in Italy, which was nonetheless pulped after someone described in it sued, or Aftermath, about the breakdown of her marriage, which led to a critical mauling in the press). And yet she continues to refuse to pull even a wisp of wool over her own – or anyone else’s – eyes. Self-consciously original, inward and undeterred, she has become ever more persistently determined to write about life precisely as she finds it, and in Parade pulls off a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat.
It was with Outline (2014) that Cusk pioneered a new approach to writing, a way of grafting fiction to autobiography with a fluency that made you wonder why more novels were not written this way. And the answer to that question can only be that she is a one-off, an acquired taste worth acquiring: no one else can do what she does in the way that she does it. Parade takes her experiment further: it pursues and deepens her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent. Each subject is approached with an intellectual intensity that suddenly struck me as being French in character (Cusk lives in Paris, which might have lent extra encouragement).
