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.
An icy thought experiment ... Intellectually, these thoughts can be exhilarating. Instead of plot or character development, Cusk offers a gimlet-eyed analysis of what it is to be the creator of a world in which nobody really exists ... This Cuskian narrator’s voice – cold, detached, judgmental, excoriating – emerges as a dominant and distinctive energy, an individual ... This deepening of chaos is Cusk’s artistic project here, and she delivers it coldly. No doubt she’s pausing now to observe our pain.
Parade has perplexed reviewers and will perhaps do the same to readers — unless they understand what Cusk is after or are curious enough to find out ... When Cusk writes about the erasure of women, whether on the page, in society or in relationships, she means it (as Lawrence did) literally. It is not only spiritual or mental death but an all-encompassing end. Parade takes this idea a step further, exploring the total destruction of the female self through art ... While the last section of the book, 'The Spy,' is the weakest, 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.
Skippable for all but her most devoted tier of readers ... Sterile, ostentatious and essentially plotless, Parade is an antinovel, a little black box of a book. It fails the Hardwick Test. The sole burden of an antinovel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, is that it must be consistently...interesting ... Airless and abstract ... The art talk that consumes this novel is leaden. It is the way you might begin to speak if you were raised solely in the Tate and the Whitney and had never eaten a hot dog.
