Whose Voices Are These?

Leland de la Durantaye considers art, abstraction, and violence in Rachel Cusk’s “Parade.”

By Leland de la DurantayeApril 6, 2025

• Fiction

A YOUNG MAN in black attends the opening of a major museum retrospective for a recently deceased female artist. He walks around the sun-filled top-floor galleries of the museum, inspecting each work; he then calmly moves to the railing and, without a word, dives to his death. This is the central event of Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Parade (2024), although no one is all that interested in it.

Like many of Cusk’s titles (Outline [2014], Transit [2016], Kudos [2018], Coventry [2019]), Parade is understated and oblique. There is indeed a literal parade in the book, but it’s only a source of trash and a hindrance to a group of well-heeled art professionals on their way to an elegant dinner. The real parade in Parade is the one of characters simply named “G.” The first G is a contemporary male painter of some renown (like Cusk’s husband). The second G is a successful contemporary female sculptor who works in soft, pliant forms. The third is a neglected 19th-century female painter. The fourth is a contemporary Black male figural painter. And that is only in the first part of the book (published several years ago as a stand-alone piece in The New Yorker). The next section follows a single G, a contemporary female painter, whose husband is, as is so often the case in Cusk’s work, a complete asshole. As the book progresses, the rate slows, but the G’s continue to come, without apparent connection, without shared interests, aesthetics, or preoccupations. And so a natural question for Cusk’s reader to ask is how to understand this fugue of identity, how to understand these variations on the theme of the artistic life. Some early reactions have been harsh, like that of Elaine Blair, who argued recently in The New York Review of Books that “the metaphor of afterbirth suggests itself: vital ideas that fed her earlier work are here expelled in clumps.” The response is understandable, given how at sea the reader is left as to what is transpiring, and why.

In her Paris Review interview with Sheila Heti published in 2020, Cusk remarked, “I’ve written quite a lot about art and artists and have cultivated a pretty deep envy of them.” In that same interview, Cusk said, “Definitely where I’m heading to is a kind of writing that I want to be much more akin to visual art.” The protagonist of Cusk’s great Outline trilogy, the feyly named Faye, is a writer, teaches writing, receives awards for writing, attends literary conferences and symposia on writing, and generally lives a very writerly life. After having so richly mined this vein in the trilogy, it seems natural for Cusk to have turned in a new direction, just as Samuel Beckett, at the end of his great trilogy, found that he could not go on in the voice and mode of The Unnamable (1953). And just as Beckett was, Cusk has been increasingly drawn to the visual arts and the parallels they offer to fiction. But why should she “envy” visual arts? And what would she envy them? Their ability to abstract? Their ability to leave the world of the personal?

Parade moves through the world of visual art, but we might ask whether the writing itself is “akin to visual art”? The answer would seem to be yes. The G’s do not share formal preoccupations or personality traits. They are clearly distinct individuals, and yet all are given the same semiabstract identity: “G.” The G may stand for Greatness or Genius or Grace or nothing at all. It is, after all, the capital letter closest in shape to Cusk’s own C (with a dash of disguise drawn across). When set alongside contemporary fiction, or Cusk’s abundant nonfiction writing, the world of the Outline trilogy was already pared down in a radical way. Circumstantial detail was kept to a minimum. That said, you still knew, as a reader, where you were. At the beginning of Outline, you know you are in Athens and soon also the neighborhood and its relation to the Acropolis and the sea and so many real markers of real places. But in Parade, you never know where you are with any precision. The book’s fictional world has been scrubbed of specificity to a more radical degree than in any of Cusk’s earlier writings. In the second part of the book, you know you are on an island, but your only bit of circumstantial evidence as to where is the name of an elderly woman on the island (another G: “Grazia”). In the third, and finest, section of the book, it is only in the last lines, and only if you have a strong grasp of German proverb, that you can identify the location of the preceding conversation (somewhere in the former West Germany, probably Düsseldorf). By scrubbing her world of specificity, Cusk has indeed made it more abstract, more painterly, and also less interesting. Something seems to have gone out of the worlds of her work such that they often appear slight and shallow.

Many of the G’s come and go quickly. The Black male figural painter is a cipher. We learn nothing about him or his world or his life, nothing of what it is like to be a Black man or a figural painter or anything at all of his interiority or experience, beyond that he has painted a luminous cathedral facade. What we learn of the 19th-century female painter G is similarly scant. And so it goes for the other G’s, in the main. No G recurs in this fugue of identity—not quite. But one of the G’s, the second (female sculptor), has an afterlife, in the magnificent part three of the book, where she is receiving posthumous kudos. The aforementioned suicide in question doesn’t really interest anyone in the art world of part three. No one knows the victim or what despair drove him to his desperate act. Their minds are all on G, on the art of G, on the legacy of G. Biographer, museum director, personal assistant, Italian art historians, and the unspecified “we” of the narrative voice were to have taken part in a public symposium, which was canceled in the wake of the suicide. This is far and away the most successful section of the novel, offering a set piece at which Cusk excels. Here the narrative movement slows enough for Cusk to present her reader with something else at which she excels: characterization through conversation.

But why does this figure plunge to his death? Was his gesture abstract? Does he represent someone or something? Information begins to trickle out over the course of the evening’s conversation, but no explanation is given and none is earnestly sought by the protagonists. If the attentive reader recalls the point earlier in the book when this G was first introduced, however, we find a clue of sorts. The G in question creates soft sculptures of woven, pendent materials (reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois). Her art presents, according to the narrator,

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 G’s femininity, to unsex the human form.

Despite her obvious literary sophistication, Cusk is rarely allusive, and the “unsex” of the passage is an isolated instance. When Lady Macbeth asks to be unsexed, it is for the purposes of violence:

[U]nsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall […]

For Lady Macbeth, the call to be unsexed is the call to violence, the call for the removal of the obstacle to violence that is femininity, with all its care, consideration and compassion. But the unsexing of Cusk’s G goes in another direction. It is a turning back to before there was sexual difference, before gender troubles, before the violence of union, before the diabolical drive. “One of the things that interests me about G’s work,” says Julia, an art historian visiting from Italy, “is that she treats both sexes as doomed by gender, as almost interchangeable in that sense, so that a third sex emerges in which the man and the woman have merged into each other and become neutral.”

To say that “the violence of gender” has been central to Cusk’s writing would be a huge understatement. The theme of marital discord is prominent everywhere, what Cusk called, in her memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012), the fraying of the “million-threaded illusion of harmony.” No matter the thread count, harmony is an illusion in Cusk’s worlds. The violence of gender is indeed her great and abiding theme, and so it comes as little surprise that she was asked to write a new stage version of Euripides’s Medea in 2015. Cusk’s Medea does not kill her own children as the Medea of Euripides does, but she brings about their deaths all the same. More importantly, she annihilates the man who hurt her, and she does so through her skill in writing. She writes her way into power and writes his way out of it. In keeping with the conventions of Athenian tragedy (and the BBC), the violence of Cusk’s Medea happens offstage, and is recounted to the audience by a messenger, speaking in rhymed couplets: “I’m just an onlooker to this drama— / though that does involve a degree of trauma.” The finest of the couplets comes at the end of this long speech: “Darkness is coming for him, black and true / Call it justice or call it evil, up to you.”

T. S. Eliot once wrote that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Cusk is a prose writer to whom Eliot’s poetic dictum applies well. The impassivity of the voice in Outline is part of what makes it so mesmerizing. What could a person of such incredible restraint, such unprecedented openness, be like? The last G of Parade (the sixth) has a brief and unsuccessful foray into fiction-writing, about which we learn that “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.” This is the problem of Parade. Faye’s hypnotizing voice holds the reader from the beginning to the end of the Outline trilogy. But in Parade, we must constantly ask, “Whose voice is this? Whose voices are these?” For even in the excellent third section of the book, the narrative voice fidgets back and forth between an anonymous third person and a no-less-anonymous first-person plural, without ever settling into a rhythm, without coalescing into a voice.

Of this sixth and final G, we also read that “instead of directing his characters he merely watched them, without interfering, like the humble kind of god.” Unlike Parade, the trilogy ends with what feels like an emblematic image. The narrator Faye has stumbled across a beach in Portugal that appears to be a point of homosexual rendezvous. The many men on the beach eye her uneasily. Faye makes her way along the beach and into the water. Once she has swam out, she sees one of these men approach the water and begin pissing into it:

He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more. The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes, and I waited for him to stop.

These are not the words of a humble kind of god. And the lesson of Parade would seem to be that it is hard to be a humble kind of god and still hold the reader mesmerized.