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.
An experiment that foregrounds theme, striking its notes — on gender, artmaking, motherhood, freedom, death — with force ... Some of it feels like an argument with someone who isn’t anywhere on the page ... Cusk’s work...has this power, to disturb and unsettle, to subtly rearrange the space of one’s mind.
Further develops Ms. Cusk’s ideas about identity and creative freedom. The novel comprises a suite of thematically related tales ... Sentiment has no place in this book ... Her approach has brought this brilliant writer to a cul-de-sac. This is a work of dry, formal mastery, far too bloodless and static to challenge my own experience of reality.
Much of Parade reads like catalogue copy for an unseen art exhibit ... Inscrutable private language...has allowed her flatly essentialist views about gender to pass for the feminist avant-garde ... What Cusk really means is that women must make art about being mothers. If they refuse to do this, they are effectively neutering themselves ... Of feminism, Cusk knows very little, and she is eager to prove it ... Cusk, I’m afraid, is one of those rare writers whose genius exceeds the depth of her own experience. She has taken some fine observations about bourgeois motherhood under late capitalism and annealed them, through sheer intensity of talent, into empty aphorisms about the second sex. In so doing, she has wasted an enormous amount of energy on making the idea of female freedom unthinkable — an ironic choice for a writer who has achieved something like canonicity within her own lifetime.
Cusk once again flouts traditional narrative to probe questions about the connections between freedom, gender, domesticity, art, and suffering in a series of fractured, loosely connected, quasi-essayic fictional episodes ... This novel, intermittently intriguing but mostly alienating, asks too much of readers.
What concerns Cusk isn’t necessarily new, and her musings on gender sit on the unfashionable side of identity discourse. But Cusk’s forensic attention elevates the genteel middle-class squabbles that have become an obsession for her into something timeless ... Cusk has shown that she has been able to tie together the loose ends of her earlier work, transmuting the brutal self-examination that she perfected in her memoirs into fiction.
Unconventional ... Even those who are fans of the British writer’s memoirs, essays, and novels, which often revolve around power and who has it, may be daunted by this conceptual work of four interlinked vignettes ... If you’re interested in how artists perceive the world and make something new of it, the novel offers insights into the messy cauldron of creativity.
This is Cusk’s negative theology of the self, a desire to imagine lives perfectly unconditioned and undetermined, no longer shaped by history, culture, or even psychological continuity ... What Cusk has relinquished, as if in a kind of penance, is her curiosity. Even at its most austere, her previous work displayed a fascination with the experience of encountering others ... Too pallid ... The problem is not that Cusk has trouble finding a language adequate to her theory of the burdens of identity—the problem may be instead that she has found that language, and it is clean indeed, scoured so free of attachments as to become translucent. Parade wants to replace the usual enticements of fiction—people and the story of their destinies—with the illumination of pure possibility. As such, the novel seems designed to provoke demands that it won’t satisfy.
I have admired, sometimes loved, all of Cusk’s books even as I have found myself recoiling, even laughing, at her hysterical descriptions of unhappiness. Is life really so cold and harsh? ... The experience of reading Parade is like walking over shards of broken glass, a phrase that is used in the book’s final line. It doesn’t feel bracing, it feels unnecessary. By the final page I was reminded of that most loathsome of British phrases, one I’ve never had cause to utter until now: Cheer up, love, it might never happen.
I have nothing against the documentation of misery, by Cusk or anybody else. But I do struggle with expressions of emotion that feel inorganic and bloodless, which Cusk’s sometimes do, despite the intensity they contend with ... No doubt there are things I am missing but, having trudged through Parade once, I read it again, and so can be confident that it is my least successful encounter with Cusk yet – and not for lack of trying on my part ... Cusk’s brilliance on a sentence level is as dazzling as ever ... This is Cusk at her most exciting: capturing succinctly relations between people that are usually both too generic and too complex to summarise. Such sentences are almost aphoristic, but not at all glib – instead completely specific. Her work is littered with such striking moments, clear and fine as the chime of a bell, but the reader must endure a great deal of white noise to find them. Much more of my time was spent despairing at Cusk’s intentionally opaque approach to storytelling ... The novel as a whole is characterised by an atmosphere of deliberate withholding, which feels more tiresome and wasteful than provocatively disruptive.
Rachel Cusk’s latest novel is filled with the direct, clean prose that readers returning to her work will find familiar. She writes with a clarity which feels unusual and initially disorienting ... Cusk captures the visceral imagination succinctly.
Experimental fiction that consists of a quartet of thematically connected sections ... Quietly menacing ... Cusk’s vision of what it is to be human is largely centred around pained bourgeois experience ... The writing regularly takes on a detached, essayistic mode to offer seemingly decisive but somewhat obtuse pronouncements about these matters ... In terms of Cusk’s ouevre, is there anything new here? Does the novel represent an exciting development for the author? Not particularly.
I, for one, remain in camp Cusk ... Whatever their medium, artists are ultimately trying to make sense of the world. As that world makes increasingly less sense, their task becomes more complicated, and more necessary. The essayistic reflections on the female condition in Parade may irk or intrigue, but as its narrator remarks, 'art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word'.
Fragmentary, elusive, ambiguously semi-autobiographical ... A novel of ideas with the novel taken out ... There is a sense in these pages of the novel finally confronting itself, or its real stakes: an acknowledgement of depersonalization or unfeeling rendered, despite itself, with great feeling.
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 ... She is interested in showing the ways in which we all – women most of all – are performing as ourselves, our homes our stages – and believes it possible that most of us continue to behave as if we were being observed even when on our own ... While Cusk’s painter concentrates on painting the world upside down, Cusk keeps turning it inside out.
Shifting from first person to second and third in narrations of poetic nuance and forthright assertions, Cusk’s haunted characters grapple with arresting and provocative conundrums pertaining to creativity, self, recognition, gender, motherhood, love, and death.
It’s hard not to understand G’s imagined films and paintings as statement of purpose for Parade: a novel but upside down, an act of storytelling uninterested in "resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality" ... Throughout, the author declines to elucidate. An inevitable consequence of this strategy is that all this begins to feel like chatter. Parade wants to tackle an intersecting network of concerns... But the book is not willing to animate any of these; they are not the themes of a story, they are sloganeering ... Parade doesn’t engage with these ideas, simply offers them to us, a commodity, now, a new book by Rachel Cusk, an upside-down novel.
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, ,em>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. The word 'violence' reappears every few pages, applied not only to art and people but even the glinting face of a mountain that towers over the narrator’s seaside vacation. One of the book’s most engaging sections dissects a suicide that takes place at an art exhibit and raises the question of whether the art itself is implicated. Through her characters, 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.
...she recently told the critic Merve Emre of her desire, fed by the experience of reading fiction in French, to make time 'go very, very, very slowly in a book.' Whatever else she does in her perplexing new novel, she has certainly done that ... The result is a puzzle of an anti-novel, mixing austerity with florid rhetoric ... Parade isn’t a burnable text so much as a self-immolating one, Cusk’s most audacious experiment yet in starving a novel of its usual sources of life. Easy reading it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t intrigue – thrills, even – in its relentless stress-testing of the form’s elasticity ... a disappearing act, an attempt to shed voice, to evade being pinned down. By the end, it’s impossible to deny the emotional logic: this novel, not answerable in any sense of the word, is a kind of prison-break from the confines of legibility. I don’t doubt its necessity for Cusk; but as a reading experience, it smacks less of liberation than limbo.
...the kind of novel certain readers will embrace as speaking powerfully to their concerns in an enriching and stimulating way, and certain readers will want to throw across the room. I really don’t think she’d have it any other way. If you’d like to read a serious, challenging, cerebral novel of ideas, which doubles as an exegesis on the relationship of art to reality and (often, but not always) the female condition, then you’ll eat Parade up. If, on the other hand, you come looking for humor, narrative arcs, fantasy, or even character, you’ll be rather out of luck—Cusk alternately has no interest in these things or is quite purposefully doing something else ... if it’s occasionally tiring in its thematic rigor, I found the book both breathtaking and beautiful ... the rare book (or movie or painting) that sees the world and its relationships in so singular a way that it changes the way you see. While she won’t let you relax into easy truisms, Cusk in the end honors the reader with her strenuous striving for truth. I wouldn’t want every novel to be like this, but I’m glad this one is.
Stimulating ... Though the connections between the sections can feel tenuous, the author’s spare approach to character is as sharp as ever. Once again, Cusk offers ranging and resonant perspectives on art, love, and femininity.
