( MENAFN - The Conversation) Rachel Cusk's new novel conjures myriad acts of creation – of lives and of art. It explores the violence creation entails and the possibilities it opens. Her twelfth novel, Parade is concerned with artists, with mothers and children, and with place: material, psychological, historical, cosmic.
This is familiar terrain. But, as ever with Cusk's writing in all its forms – fiction, memoir, essay – she renders the familiar strange in ways that force us to see it anew. Perhaps this is the best way to describe, or to recognise, the operations of art in a world continually in the throes of collapse and transmutation.
It's certainly the way Cusk presents the work of“G” at the outset of this novel: Review: Parade – Rachel Cusk (Faber) The disturbance of G's paintings is echoed in Parade's form. Defined on its title page as a novel, it appears to be four interlinked fragments, all narrated in different voices. It seems to eradicate even the ghost of the narrative throughline that haunted Cusk's Outline trilogy (2014-2018) and Second Place (2021), all acts of ventriloquism that refused the novel's conventional bonds of plot and character development.
Which amounts to refusing the binding narrative of romance. If the Outline trilogy imploded the traditional novel form, constellating the world through the perceiving and yet mysteriously absent“I” of its narrator, Faye, then Parade explodes it into a series of shattered accounts – with no gove.
