In her most recent novel Parade, released in paperback this month by Picador, Rachel Cusk deploys an array of mental gymnastics moves to the purpose of probing virgin soil, which in the case of this book, are regions where issues of representation and abstraction have historically remained unquestioned. As is usual with Cuskian themes and preoccupations, the novel acutely interrogates these issues as they relate to female identity and the reality of womanhood. The novel is divided into four sections, each with its own overarching narrative and individual themes. There are multiple stories that occur in all four, and all sections contain events, details, and images that curiously and somewhat mysteriously refer to one another from different and often unexpected angles and vantage points. Like, for instance, how the mention of a suicide at a museum that transpires in the first section is examined further in the light of the different and new narrative context of the third section, both of which, however, occur at an exhibition of work by a revolutionary and transgressive female sculptor G who makes artworks that include the likes of “giant forms of black spiders, balanced on stiletto-like feet”.[1] The reader comes away from the experience of Parade feeling very much as if their perceptions of the reality of living as a woman and how others perceive that reality have been flipped upside down, in the best way. The first section of the novel gets right to work at prompting this awareness, as, when it opens, one of the many (nameless) artists Cusk deploys - “G” - has just begun to paint upside down midway through his career.
The Stuntman
In this first section, the narrator explains that the indiscriminately named male painter G comes to the notion of inverting his paintings after a long period of watching local foresters cutting down trees. He begins to imagine the human body and the limbs of trees as interchangeable and paints them in that way. The narrator explains:
“The notion of inversion finally came to him as a means of resolving this violence and restoring the principle of wholeness, so that the world was once more intact but upside down and thus free from the constraint of reality.”[2]
And also,
“G began to paint large, intricate landscapes in which nature seemed to be in its heyday, seemed to speak of its power of recovery from human violence…it basked in a wordless moral plenitude, innocent and unconscious of the complete inversion it had undergone, and it was this quality of innocence, or ignorance, that succeeded in entirely detaching the representational value of the painting from what it appeared to represent.”[3]
There is one of these paintings in particular that the painter’s wife loves; it is a painting of inverted slender birch trees in sunlight. She describes it as having a “demented calmness and innocence” and she loves it for the way in which it suggests the possibility of madness as a kind of shelter. The image that the description of this painting both by the narrator and the painter’s wife offers is striking for the way that it directs the mind to associations of free thought wherein the world of objects, and reality itself, may be contemplated anew, in a way where that reality is liberated from preconceived ideas relevant to its positioning in historical contexts and those that are implied and brought to bear by the viewer. The problem remains, naturally, that reality as we know it exists upright. However, Cusk guides the reader to think about how objective reality, when depicted upside down, may be refreshed by new perspectives, and perhaps she is suggesting in this section, that when reality is revolved around the other way and brought back upright with these new perspectives, it can generate new relationships with the object world that might be closer to the truth and less illusory. Cusk’s narrator is conscious of the limitations of the kind of abstraction that the painter G exhibits with this new line of work, and the narrator poses the question later in part one to the audience, “Was abstraction – like imagination or fantasy – merely a mechanism of escape? Was there some debt that was left unpaid in this abandonment of the scene of limitation? It was a question not just about the moral value of freedom in the context of aestheticism, but about the actual nature of freedom itself.”[4] I believe that Cusk intentionally leaves this question open ended here, as her whole novel is searching lyrically for answers to the relationship between abstraction and representation.
Cusk’s concept of “the stuntman” in this section is fascinating and innovative, always her hallmarks. The idea of the stuntman emerges out of a violent scene in which one of the narrator’s, a female, is forcibly attacked in the head by another female on a blithe, sunny morning walking by an outdoor café with people casually sipping coffee. The narrator’s initial reaction was shock that the assailant had been a woman. She goes on to recount her reaction to the event:
“Those female experiences, I now saw, had usually been attributed to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity. Despite having no name or identity of her own, the stuntman was what created both the possibilities and the artificiality of character.”[5]
In other words, what this assailant had done to the narrator by means of the sheer shock of the event, was disorient “the stuntman” that typically was there to absorb violent and uncomfortable experiences for the narrator so that she could go on manufacturing a content and whole female identity for the public – an identity which is technically an illusion as it denies the real experience that her stuntman absorbs and confines for her.
One other fascinating portion of this first section, though there are many, is the account of a female painter – also nameless and ascribed with the letter G, like the other male painter observed in this section – who attempts to depict “the reality of womanhood in Art” or the “reality of the female experience” in an amusing and curious way: the female artist paints a picture of her husband who has fallen asleep in a chair and with that simple image Cusk notes that the whole history of women painted asleep in beds the artist has clearly just vacated is quietly mocked. The narrator offers an interpretive response: “It is not usual for a record to be made of those perceptions: G’s point might have been that if one were to answer truthfully the question of what a female art might look like, it would have to be composed chiefly of a sort of non-existence.”[6]
The Midwife
This section opens with a female painter G. It is unclear whether this is the same female painter from the previous section, as there are no direct correspondences to this other artist drawn or pieces of evidence laid, other than the facts of her identity, female, and her medium, paint. Cusk arranges description of all other artists described in the novel in the same way - using only indirect references to their appearances in other parts – and this ambiguity is exceptionally clever for the way that it raises the reader’s consciousness and makes them aware of how much weight they put on gender specifically when recalling an artist and the work that they manufacture. It is a brilliant innovation with form, and one that I have never witnessed in a work of literary fiction.
I love the description of when this female painter becomes “identifiably female.” Here is the moment:
“She stayed with the boy’s parents’ gallery for three years, and began to make enough money to give up the job in the bar. She went to openings at other galleries and met other artists. Something had changed: somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness. It entailed judgment, not of her person but of her actions. Her actions were chaotic and lacked self-interest. She sometimes felt other people looking out at her from within their own self-interest, puzzled or amused. She felt gaudy and exposed, and when she looked back on this time now – now that composure was finally within her grasp, whether or not she troubled to reach for it – she was swept by a terrible grief, for it was in that provisional, perilous and occasionally thrilling period while she thrashed the work out of her body that she understood she had been unloved.”[7]
I found the resonance of this image of the female artist piercing, for its honesty but even moreso for its cutting insight. Cusk’s narrator also doesn’t shy away from how tragic and sad this realization is for the artist. If it is read properly, this moment in the text provides a dense catharsis for the keen female reader. In so many words, in this passage, the artist is coming to the realization that the years of hardship she endured in order to even make it to these gallery type events was the result of a made-up illusory social fabrication that she inherited, and that could never have been avoided. In spite of this inheritance, and the societal forces that resisted her along the way, that made her feel “unloved,” she is spit out at the other end of the years of chaotic thrashing into the glories of the male-dominated art world where she is still the weakest link, for reasons that are illusory, and the only thing that has changed really is that now she has a better understanding of why they are that way. But, lucky for her, at least now composure is finally within her grasp.
Shame is a motif that appears consistently throughout this text. One of its first manifestations takes place in this section by means of the “shamelessness” of G’s paintings. It is here that Cusk explores the relationship between shame and form and her narrator makes the interesting observation that expressions of shame are the easiest to express through form, but notes, in so many words, that form isn’t inherently revolutionary because it employs silence, not disclosure. As a consquence of the artist’s yearning to disclose, or to tell her audience about her shame, she interestingly turns to very expressive childhood paintings that are described as being “horrible, pornographic, and gleeful”:
“She painted everything she dreaded and hated, but joyously, like a child exerting power in private by playing with plastic figures and making them do things to each other.”[8]
This part of the text is a groundbreaking exploration of how an artist can best convey emotional reality.
The last part of “The Midwife” section I wish to call attention to is what I will call Cusk’s “Edward Gorey moment.” Critics who have written about Cusk and her work have collectively remarked upon the honesty of her writing; I mention above that this is one of the qualities that I too love about her writing. She deliberately chooses not to avoid evidently darker experiences and aspects of both the female experience and womanhood for the sake of the reader’s comfort, and I think that the Edward Gorey moment is a perfect demonstration of that. Towards the end of this section, Cusk’s narrator recounts:
“One time, the nanny said darkly, a woman was walking with her baby in a pram and when she tried to cross the road the truck didn’t stop. It hit the pram and the woman was left standing empty-handed by the side of the road.”[9]
For those readers who may be unfamiliar with his work, Edward Gorey was a writer and an illustrator whose style was often characterized by depicting “vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.”[10]
The Diver
The first mention of any parade happens in this section, and it serves as a sturdy backdrop for Cusk to evaluate, with the help of both character and incident, the nature of freedom itself. There is a parade that occurs outside of the museum where the artist G’s exhibition is taking place. There is a character, Betsy, who has trouble walking through the litter and broken glass outside of the museum because she has hurt her leg. Betsy notices that the city has installed the municipal workers to clean up after the people who threw the parade, and remarks: “What sort of anarchy is this supposed to be, where the city rushes straight in to clean up the results of its own tolerance? It’s like some browbeaten mother sneaking in to clean up her teenager’s bedroom. They should have made them clean it up themselves.”[11]
Betsy is a walking contradiction, as after proclaiming this, she expounds that her “ambition all [her] life has been to avoid the things people say you have to do…”[12] A professor who is sitting with Betsy at the museum conference responds to her and observes, “Yet you require others to have self-control and to clean up after their own parade.”[13]
Betsy tells Mauro, the professor, and the rest of the group, that she believes it was her mother who instilled this stubborn quality in her, who made her feel like she had the right and the power to refuse to do anything that she did not wish to do. She also says that she believes it was her mother’s good intention to teach her that she could have power, “and most people don’t teach little girls that.”[14] And so, what Cusk sharply executes with this scene, is an instance when she makes her character itself become an abstraction, by means of the character’s contradictory and seemingly antithetical remarks. In doing so, Cusk carries out a literary investigation of the nature of freedom and reflects, in a meta or a self-reflexive manner, on the challenges of representing the true nature of freedom in narrative.
The Spy
The story that frames this section is one of a mother’s death and her childrens’ responses to it. It is stunning the way that Cusk positions the image of its setting so that the characters are looking out at the remnants – the litter and broken glass – left behind from the parade outside the museum where one of the artist’s exhibitions is occurring simultaneously. They are looking out from the ninth floor of a beautiful hotel room in an unnamed city – as all the locations, like the artists in the book, are left unnamed. The way Cusk shapes the novel so that the characters and their stories and settings intersect and interact with one another is dynamic and with its form she seems to be echoing her own longstanding belief that reality is always truer and better than the way it is represented, and yet, notwithstanding the weight of that knowledge, she persists inventively with her craft to represent it in its truest and most beautiful form.
Sources Cited
1. Cusk, Rachel. Parade. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
2. “Edward Gorey,” Wikipedia, last modified June 12, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gorey.
Links to Explore:
Acocella, Joan. "Edward Gorey’s Enigmatic World." The New Yorker, December 10, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/edward-goreys-enigmatic-world.
[1] Cusk, Rachel. Parade. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, 24.
[2] Cusk, 4.
[3] Cusk, 6.
[4] Cusk, 42.
[5] Cusk, 13.
[6] Cusk, 32.
[7] Cusk, 50.
[8] Cusk, 61.
[9] Cusk, 84.
[10] “Edward Gorey,” Wikipedia, last modified June 12, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gorey.
[11] Cusk, 103.
[12] Cusk, 105.
[13] Cusk, 105.
[14] Cusk, 106.