I’ve never really been a fan of parades. A long stream of people and things marching past with seemingly the whole point being made up of waiting for the thing to finish. There is, though, about most parades, a sense of ostentation, of celebration, of exuberance, even joy. Unfortunately, Rachel Cusk’s Parade lacks celebration, exuberance and joy. What ostentation it might be said to possess is largely a kind of bludgeoning excess of depressive philosophobabble, which means that the wait for it to finish is ultimately so tedious that the novel feels much longer than its 198 pages.
The novel is divided into chapters entitled ‘The Stuntman’, ‘The Midwife’, ‘The Diver’, and ‘The Spy’, each of which are emblematic of one part of Cusk’s exploration of feminine experience. This is propelled by and intertwined with Cusk’s contemplation of the violence and function of representation, as the book tells of a sequence of artists who are all rendered by the single initial ‘G’, and who each deal in some way with the insufficiency and brutality of the artistic act.
There are some interesting concepts here: the stuntman allows for identity to be divided and for one to experience one’s own life as a bystander; the midwife both brings life into the world and assists in erasing it; the diver displays power through submission; the spy sees the world more clearly because they do not participate. The problem is that instead of taking these ideas and building a narrative to engage the reader, Cusk takes these ideas and clothes them in layer upon layer of dry, repetitive prose devoid of any wit or self-awareness. There are so many moments where the reader wants to find some satire, or at least some self-deprecation, but it never comes. Instead, what we get is haughty, shallow philosophising, with no plot to speak of and no character for us to care about.
Only if the writing were deft, and if the tone had variation and virtuosity, could a reader devote their attention to this book and come out feeling that the core ideas had been enriched by the act of writing about them. But the writing is stilted, and the tone incessantly bloodless and monotonous. It is to feminist and aesthetic discourse a mercifully short version of what we might imagine Edward Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies to have been had it ever actually existed. There are so many better things to read on the subjects that Cusk tries to write about in Parade that unless you’re a diehard Cusk fan who needs to have read all her work for your sense of personal accomplishment, I really can’t find any reason why you’d bother.
Click here to change your cookie preferences