Rachel Cusk

Dominated by tropes of repetition, inversion, and doubling, Parade feels like a hall of mirrors that reflects and re-imagines pieces of reality while also refracting elements of Rachel Cusk’s own body of work. This is not recognisably a novel or a collection of short fiction, but a new iteration of the style initiated by Cusk’s lauded Outline trilogy (2014), a patchwork of vignettes unfolded by an enigmatic narrator. Cusk continues to push the boundaries of fiction, exploring oscillating paradoxes of connection and disconnection, passion and dispassion, attachment and hatred, creation and destruction. At the heart of all of these is the generative primal conflict of gender; together these form the bleak coordinates of the Cusk cosmos.

In Second Place, the narrator, M, reminisces about the time she invited the artist L to stay on her remote property ‘on the marsh’. Fifteen years earlier in Paris, a painting of L’s on a poster advertising a major retrospective of his art had spoken to M of ‘absolute freedom’. She was then ‘a young mother on the brink of rebellion’. The night before she had allowed a famous writer – ‘an egotist, permanently drunk on his own importance’ – to string her along and then dump her unceremoniously once he decided she wasn’t worth the risk. Viewing L’s paintings in the gallery the next morning, M had felt herself ‘falling out of the frame’ of her own life and ‘became distinct from it’.

Two years before Rachel Cusk published the first novel in her acclaimed Outline Trilogy (2014–18), she wrote a searing account of her divorce, entitled ‘Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation’, which ignited a brouhaha in her homeland, the United Kingdom. The dramatic excoriation of marital life aroused apoplexy among critics and readers; they bristled at Cusk’s subjective and one-sided storytelling, as if any other account of divorce were possible. It wasn’t the first time Cusk’s work had raised eyebrows: her memoir, A Life’s Work: On becoming a mother (2001), offended many a book-club member with its frank and unflattering descriptions of motherhood.

Kudos concludes the extraordinary trilogy that began with Outline (2014) and Transit (2016). Following the distinctive format of the first two books, Kudos is structured by a series of conversations between the narrator (a writer named Faye, who seems to be a barely disguised version of Cusk) and various interlocutors, in which the narrator herself speaks barely at all. As before, there is nothing much in the way of a traditional plot or narrative ...