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How Rachel Cusk’s ‘Parade’ Breaks Novel Ground
The Canadian-born, Paris-based author talks about turning narratives upside down, the art world and why she hates interviews / BY Rosemary Counter / June 25th, 2024
Acclaimed, experimental and often controversial novelist Rachel Cusk doesn’t particularly want to talk to me. As a journalist who’d love to meet her, I’m a bit disappointed. But as a new fan, I’m totally impressed with the Salinger-esque eschewing of publicity and convention. Cusk doesn’t play by either publishing or literary rules.
Take, for example, My Life’s Work: On Becoming A Writer, her divisive 2002 memoir. Cusk’s brutally honest take on parenting—par for the course 22 years later —unapologetically articulated the bleak reality of new motherhood. “I become an undone task, a phone call I can’t seem to make, a bill I don’t get around to paying,” she wrote. “My life has the seething atmosphere of an untended garden.” For saying what the world would prefer women merely think, her book garnered so much vitriol that Cusk stopped reading reviews.
Parade is 57-year-old Cusk’s 17th book, and like all the others, it’s abstract, experimental, a bit strange and yet oddly hypnotic. In four sections with multiple vignettes throughout, we meet four artists – each named, vaguely, G. Some Gs are male, others female; one’s a filmmaker and others are painters, but, collectively, G. is in each instance an artist struggling to create against hurdles tangible and imagined. “Cusk wants to write a book about no one,” The Atlantic wrote, describing the book as a “lonely experiment.”
Captivatingly poetic and notoriously private, Cusk – after a half-dozen increasingly desperate emails from this writer – finally agreed to a fast 20-minute Zoom call from Paris for a characteristically Cusk-ian conversation about why her books are so difficult to talk about, how she’s constantly challenging the form of the novel and why she rarely does interviews.
Rosemary K Counter: Thank you for doing this interview! I know you don’t love them.
Rachel Cusk: I’ve just done too many of them, to be honest. When I first started out writing, I was incredibly shy and found talking about my work – any kind of public appearance, really – totally impossible. In 30 years. I’ve worked so hard to be able to do them, and now I’m just tired of them. But anyway, I’m very happy to be here. Really.
RKC: Haha, I won’t take it personally. And I get it: Your books aren’t easy to talk about. To me, they’re like having a great strange dream, but when someone asks what it was about, you can’t begin to explain. How would you describe this book?
RC: This book’s a real leap into unknown territory, even for me. I play around a lot with form and I try to drop or invert the whole idea of narrative. Structurally, this book feels, as you say, dream-like, and fragmented and surreal. The book progresses from first person to third, which is important, because the book moves away from an individual experience and towards something more collective. I know this can be challenging…
RKC: Challenging is good. If I wanted a beach read, there’s lots of those. This isn’t that.
RC: It’s not, no. I suppose this has something to do with aging, and with the breakdown of certain beliefs about the story of life, if there is one, but the book reflects my interest in the idea that oneself is not so central. Certain common experiences tend to break down the idea of individuality. In Parade, for example, one of these is violence – whether that’s death, or random assault, or abuse. We tend to view these things in our own lives as kind of freak, unlucky experiences when they’re absolutely not.
RKC: So experiences can be universal, but in this book, so are the characters. Each of four parts features a character called G. What is the link between them?
RC: In the end, G. is a composite artist figure, and the book is trying to look at lives that produce an image – not a story, not words – but an image we can look at. I’m interested in this idea about artists’ biographies, that maybe these lives combine into art and shapes and forms. This feeling of artistic authority, which is usually an individual male with a female muse at his side, seems to be breaking down and passing to other people.
RKC: Is there a conflict between visual art specifically and the idea of collective art? We’re so used to associating works of art with their creators, like the Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci and nobody else.
RC: That’s exactly it. These are images we all see and know, but we don’t read visual art through the biographical context of the artist the way we do with writers. That’s almost regarded as a sort of cheapening of the mysticism of the art, to know too much about the person who created it. It’s much more about the image itself and how it moves the rest of us.
RKC: When it comes to writers, we want to know: Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Where did this idea come from? No wonder you don’t like interviews.
RC: That’s true, but I will tell you that I was born in [Saskatoon in] Canada, even though I left as a baby. I don’t feel particularly Canadian, except in its female literary heritage. I have many good Canadian women friends like Sheila Heti who I really, really, really admire.
RKC: You two must have the most thought-provoking writerly conversations. I loved Heti’s Motherhood, and even though I hate asking every woman writer how they manage work and life, specifically motherhood. The truth is I’m genuinely interested. Is that your biggest challenge as a writer and an artist?
RC: I have the very same challenge as all artists: There’s a sort of duty to serve or account for who you are. I do feel a sort of obligation to write about femininity that the average entitled white guy does not. That’s something I feel applies to me.
RKC: Do you read your reviews? Do you care about them?
RC: No. I don’t read them, because then I would care about them. My husband reads them for me and only tells me if I ask. I’ve been very, very, very criticized over the years and that’s still painful. I have to accept that I’m criticized often because I often write things that are shocking, and I’d rather write shocking things than things that are totally acceptable. But at a certain point, I got such violent criticism that I had to stop engaging.
RKC: I assume you mean My Life’s Work? I read that Oprah invited you on her show to discuss it but you turned her down.
RC: My children were very small and I didn’t have time to go to America. I was very busy then. I am now too, as I’ve found that writing definitely gets harder, not easier, probably because the things I’m doing are harder. Parade was very, very difficult to write, and it was often hard in completely new ways, so I kept having to throw it out and do it again.
RKC: Is it challenging to constantly reinvent yourself? If you were doing those beach reads, you could just follow the formula.
RC: I could, I suppose, though maybe not. I find that life does that for you, if you pay enough attention. It always inflicts enough change on you, one way or another.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.