Parade - by Rachel Cusk (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries. When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom. Parade is a novel that demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell the story of G, an artist whose life contains many lives. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is."--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year (So Far) by The New Yorker and Vulture

From Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, comes this startling, exhilarating novel that once again expands the notion of what fiction can be and do.

Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.

When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

Parade is a novel that demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell the story of G, an artist whose life contains many lives. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.

Review Quotes

"Examining the life of the artist and the composition of the self, Rachel Cusk's Parade exposes the power and limitations of our alternate selves. Probing the limits of the novel form and pushing back against convention, this is a work that resets our understanding of what the long form makes possible."
--Dr. Abigail Shinn, Chair of Judges of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize

"Formally frenetic and sharp line by line, Parade doesn't mimic decades-old experimental modes . . . Instead, Cusk has written something genuinely new--again."
--Maddie Crum, Vulture

"Rachel Cusk is one of the smartest and most original writers alive . . . Parade is, among other things, a fascinating literary exploration of gender as performance, bristling with counterintuitive truths occluded by received ideas."
--Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp, The Sydney Morning Herald

"Cusk's quiet meditations on the self are beautifully worded . . . A deeply engrossing book. As ever, Cusk's writing is captivating in its understatement. Her attention to the act of living is something to wonder at."
--Annie Hayter, Big Issue

"[Rachel Cusk] is rightly revered for her writing. Cusk's crystal-clear prose is always emotionally confronting and psychologically complex, but always deeply thought-provoking too."
--Edel Coffey, The Gloss

"Marginality is one of many recurring themes in these exceptional pieces, from artists of color who feel unseen to women subjugated by men . . . Cusk returns often to themes of freedom, relations between parents and children, and the question of whether conventionality hinders or stimulates creativity in this marvelous work."
--Michael Magras, Shelf Awareness

"[Cusk's] most fully realized work . . . Both the end result and the metafictional enactment of Cusk's career up to this point, an astute work of philosophical rigor and artistic skill . . . A philosophical work of proportions not often found in contemporary fiction . . . Cusk remains the most accomplished, talented, and risk-adept novelist writing in English, emerging into that rare and precious force: an artist so comfortable with her craft as to ably disregard--indeed, devour--every rule of the medium, a work of creation that by its very nature calls into question that which has come before it, and from it demands answer."
--D.W. White, Chicago Review of Books

"[Rachel Cusk's] writing is an example of literature's great strength: she has pulled the rug of narrative convention from our feet, as a series of stories flutter down at our feet and we are left to gather the pieces together. Resistant and abrasive to convention as ever - whilst still being a compulsive and accessible read - Parade is another success of fragmentary storytelling."
--Lucy Kenningham, City A.M.

"Rachel Cusk's fiction-making is porous and, in Parade, she continues to experiment with the way narratives form through conversations and recollection . . . Cusk writes like an angel, furnishing the inner life of her characters with an exquisite, wiry sense of perception and attunement. Parade speaks to the reader with a rare kind of truth."
--Declan Fry, ABC News (Australia)

"Because Cusk is the author it's the kind of carousel where the magic horses come to life and frequently devour the riders . . . Exacting, insightful and brutally unsentimental . . . Lives are still pinned down and wriggling on the page, exposed through the author's searing, inimitable style . . . Much like life itself, discombobulating, hard to get into, and equally hard to forget. So roll up, wave a flag and join the crowds to watch Rachel Cusk continue her relentless march through life."
--Sarah Gilmartin, The Irish Times

"This is her distinct style--to relinquish the novel's usual arc and instead try to pierce, through her characters, some deeper truths. For that reason, Parade will resonate with fans of Cusk's novels Outline, Transit and Kudos, which made waves for the same quiet but unrelenting voice. But Parade is willing to go to darker places . . . Cusk shows us that art can be the site of violence, and also at times, the only medium through which to save oneself from it."
--Helen Wieffering, Associated Press

"Parade, a standalone work, further develops Ms. Cusk's ideas about identity and creative freedom . . . Cusk explores the struggle between competing forms of reality--that is, between the external reality imposed by gender, family and the limitations of the body and an inner reality dreamed into being by artists in periods of imaginative ferment."
--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Rachel Cusk once again takes the novel to another stage of definition in her latest effort . . . Cusk is trying to find a new language, a perspective that pierces at the very heart of all this new distanced living that we do . . . In a world that continues to force us to celebrate the old conventional storytelling ways . . . It's exciting to be part of Rachel Cusk's orbit . . . Parade is another link in Cusk's path to the future of the novel in general."
--Jana Siciliano, Bookreporter

"Most striking and pleasurable is the novel's juxtaposition of a quite abstracted philosophical language with rich, pulsing, sumptuous, almost hallucinatory passages describing objects, artworks, and also, especially, nature . . . It is a work of intricate patterning . . . and it seems to require a new kind of attunement on the part of the reader . . . Parade betrays a different writer, someone who isn't only bent on destruction but who recovers shards of beauty from an already broken world; a writer who believes in the transformative power of art."
--Maya Solovej, The Baffler

"Parade ultimately reveals itself to be the work of the same genius of the Outline trilogy and Second Place, one of the most exacting, terrifying novelists working today. Parade is either a guide or a warning. How thrilling not to know which."
--Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times

"[Parade] transmutes the brutal self-examination that she perfected in her memoirs into fiction . . . The animus of Cusk's autobiographical writing carries over to her fiction in a way it hadn't in previous novels--she shows us exactly how she sees herself: as the gravitational force at the center of her environment . . . In these passages Cusk has shown that she has been able to tie together the loose ends of her earlier work."
--Zsofia Paulikovics, Jacobin

"[Parade strikes] its notes--on gender, artmaking, motherhood, freedom, death--with force . . . Only a master of literary technique can afford to strip characters to their bare, indelible gestures, carved with a needle and bathed in acid, like etchings . . . Cusk's work . . . has this power, to disturb and unsettle, to subtly rearrange the space of one's mind."
--Christine Smallwood, The Washington Post

"The most musical work [Cusk] has written . . . As always in Cusk's work, a singular voice provides the red thread through the labyrinth."
--Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books

"Cusk has been clearing a path unlike any other in English-language fiction, one that seems to follow a rigorous internal logic about the confinements of genre and gender alike . . . She seems to be not describing her figures so much as joining them, sharing their desire, a kind of hunger for unreality, a yearning for the empty, unmappable spaces outside identity. The result is an intensified asceticism. Her sentences are as precise as always."
--Nicholas Dames, The Atlantic

"Parade is far from the first meditation on art, family, and gender from the prolific novelist and memoirist. But it proves gripping for the way it portrays dynamics that happen in private, even subconsciously, and are sometimes so ordinary that they don't get put into words."
--Emily Watlington, ARTNews

"In Cusk's new novel Parade, she continues to X-ray the conditions of contemporary womanhood and motherhood. The novel is thoughtful and true, with velvet prose, succulent and graceful . . . Sentence after sentence is a bullseye."
--Lucy Jones, The Independent

"Rachel Cusk's masterful exploration of art and identity... There is simply nothing like the fluidity of Rachel Cusk's language and the endless capacity of her thinking."
--Gosia Buzzanca, Buzz Magazine

"Parade pulls off a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat . . . It pursues and deepens [Cusk's] 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 . . . While Cusk's painter concentrates on painting the world upside down, Cusk keeps turning it inside out."
--Kate Kellaway, The Observer

"Cusk's genius is that, even unmoored from plot, she holds attention, still keeps fingers (and imaginations) always turning that next page . . . Less a story than a meditation on seeing and what is seen, Cusk's new novel is a work of quiet intensity with an oddly Zen quality to it; it is a book that makes demands, foremost that readers stop looking and finally see."
--Herman Sutter, Library Journal

"A stimulating experimental novel . . . [Cusk's] spare approach to character is as sharp as ever. Once again, Cusk offers ranging and resonant perspectives on art, love, and femininity."
--Publisher's Weekly

"Readers of Cusk's previous fiction will recognize the masterful way she locates specific personal histories within a relatively abstract narrative framework (minimal details of place, time, and chronology) to unsettle the reader's expectations about what fiction can or should do . . . Cusk's prose is diamond-sharp, as are her insights. Short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author

Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life's Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.