MARRIAGE IS A GRIM BUSINESS—worse still if you’re a woman in a Rachel Cusk book. The blame lies with Christian iconography, she writes in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, and pictures of the “holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry.” There, we found Mary and the manger, the Christ child, cuckolded Joseph: images gathered in a “cult of sentimentality and surfaces” to obscure the innate beastliness of human existence and so tidy death. They were fraudulent images, coercively “bent on veiling reality.” And who within the family is conscripted to perpetuate, if not precisely to manufacture, such images? Women. In becoming wives, we’re made stewards of our husbands, sainted sucklers of children, menders of life’s ripped seams. After the dissolution of a decade-long marriage, Cusk turned from Christianity to the myths of antiquity and the unconscious, that “tempestuous Greek world of feeling.” We are beings born of chaos, after all, disciplined by institutions but governed by affects and actions that stretch past the limits of our knowing and detonate the illusion of social order.
Cusk’s “fictions,” in turn, have a fabular quality, muddling fate and circumstance, conditioning and immanence. She’s not particularly interested in identity-qua-identity or the psychological and novelistic conventions of character. Instead, she’s after human “experience in a more lateral sense,” an “oceanic” and provisional representation of subjectivity. (In 2018, Cusk famously declared: “I don’t think character exists anymore.”) Her people are illuminated not by taxonomic assignations or “types” but by the digressive, existential stories they tell about their lives. In place of character, a chorus, which sings in many voices of Cusk’s enduring obsessions: the moral quality of art and its role in self-determination, the porousness of femininity, the ambivalent dynamic between motherhood and other modes of creation, and heterosexuality’s apparently animating cruelty. Colossal themes, then, become shrunk down and threaded through the needle’s eye of domestic life. Cusk, like Woolf and Morrissey before her, knows barbarism begins at home.
But if Cusk atomizes the coherence of identity, she leaves categorical gender more or less intact. It’s a question of distinction, she’s said; women and men are elementally cleaved, a separation that’s not violent “but looks like it.” Whether she sees this division as destiny is unclear. At times, Cusk suggests that childbirth presents the irreparable fracture between the sexes. At others, her philosophy of freedom demands a hybridization or transcendence of gendered difference. It would be misguided, I think, to charge Cusk with biological essentialism, in part because her characters so rarely seem to be rightful tenants of their bodies. Unlike Annie Ernaux (whom she profiled in 2022 and with whose familial tragedies hers have much in common), Cusk’s “characters” don’t excrete or fuck. When Kudos (the last entry in her pathbreaking Outline trilogy) ends with a gay man purposely urinating in the water where Faye, the narrator, is swimming, it’s a complete shock—because of the man’s misogyny and nastiness, yes, but also because you’d presumed nothing resembling a genital flopped around in Faye’s world at all.
Cusk specializes in encounters undone by eruptions of sudden brutality. She has an abiding sense of civilization—and, indeed, of art—as a kind of flimsy lacquer slapped desperately over an inexorable undercurrent of disorder. Thus her fascination in Aftermath with the Oresteia and all the “joy and anarchy of the early world, in which fantasy and reality have not yet been separated, in which . . . guilt and conscience do not yet exist.” But if art disciplines anarchy into order, it can also precipitate, or even irradiate, an encounter with the habitually repressed. For Cusk, art’s power is cathartic in the ancient Greek sense. If we are very lucky, art evokes affect—mostly “bad” affect—so we might purge or process it. Art is the piss in the water that clarifies our social position; art is what renders the fundamental shame of being human survivable. As one character argues in Parade, Cusk’s latest, artists are the odd prophets who, like children, “kept on being proud of their shit and wanting to show it to people.”
PARADE IS A STRANGE BIRD, even for Cusk. It’s less “A Novel” than a loose-knit quartet of interrogative novellas, a series of reckonings with the double knot of art and womanhood. Its ranging attentions are held together by a sticky membrane of calamitous marriages and difficult mothers. If I’m failing here to summarize the plot, that’s part of the point; from the Outline trilogy onward, plot in Cusk’s work is mostly gestural, not propulsive. Though we stumble over moments of profound rupture—a suicide, an assault in the Paris streets, shadowy photos that may indicate ongoing child abuse, as well as the deaths of several parents—nothing really happens, or these happenings lack storytelling logic’s connective tissue. Parade’s revelations come like a flood; they surface, burst, and, without warning, recede, resisting sentimental incrementalism. I found myself recalling the Parks and Recreation meme that used to circulate sort of regularly on Depression Twitter: “Do you think a novelist could make this?”
We are offered no heroine, no Faye as a buoy; instead, the book’s conflicts play through a discontinuous scrim of fictionalized artists’ lives. All of them, devilishly, are called “G,” but some will nonetheless be recognizable to the laywoman. In the book’s first sequence, “The Stuntman,” an artist based on the German neo-expressionist Georg Baselitz starts painting images upside down. This shift inadvertently uncovers a deeper layer of meaning: the political inequality undergirding his unacknowledged dependence on—and debasement of—his wife. In this section, too, we happen on Paula Modersohn-Becker (also German, also Expressionist, though earlier) and her revolutionary nude and gestational self-portraits. “The Diver,” Parade’s third movement, is the nearest the book comes to a sovereign story, a sprawling philosophical dinner conversation between a half-dozen art professionals gathered for a Louise Bourgeois retrospective. Other artists, like Norman Lewis, are invoked briefly, while some—the “wild” young woman painter traumatized by her lawyer-photographer husband in “The Midwife,” for example—seem to be composites, resembling at times Celia Paul, Ana Mendieta, or even Cusk herself.
More and more, Cusk is preoccupied by extralinguistic economies of communication, particularly vis-à-vis visual art. This fixation was the movable center of 2021’s Second Place, which riffed on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir, Lorenzo in Taos, an account of her time with D. H. Lawrence. In recent work, Cusk’s narrators largely work as writers; in Second Place, Cusk transformed Lawrence into a painter instead. Words are often hazardous, calcifying things; language, as the filmmaker in Parade’s “The Spy” insists, labors to resolve the ambiguities of human experience. But what would perhaps better serve is an art that lays bare what is, finally, irresolvable. With each book, Cusk has said, she feels she’s coming to the “end of writing as a useful occupation . . . a suicidal impulse for female creators.” Her repositioning of the aesthetic horizon, however, doesn’t produce visual fantasies that sidestep ideology. In “The Stuntman,” Baselitz’s controversial inversions signal “the advent of a new reality . . . [a method of] restoring the principal of wholeness” beyond the tedium of modernity. But his metamorphosis mandates his wife’s subordination to him: she must be either handmaiden or muse. When she first encounters her husband’s reversals, “She felt as though she had been hit.” The paintings hold the madness of womanhood in them, “her condition, the condition of her sex.” Something indispensable, she believes, has been requisitioned by him, and at last she must reckon with the cross of her “malformed freedom.” Shortly afterward, her husband begins painting her in the nude, classical representations that “objectified his wife and obliterated her.” She finds she is a receptacle for his ridicule; age and marriage, she sees, have cauterized whatever possibilities remained for her.
Cusk asks: Must domesticity always supplant or curtail female autonomy and artistry? Once I thought not; now, I am less certain. Women are the “true creators,” but we make ourselves “slaves or henchmen” to the men we love, whose own creations are mostly machines of conquest. Or so says the male filmmaker at Parade’s end. But whether G’s vision is anomalous or systematic, the upside-down world of his work seizes vitality from his wife. The paintings “made her unhappy, or rather they led her to acknowledge the existence of an unhappiness that seemed always to have been inside her.” When a woman novelist visits the couple, she remarks (with a “plaintive note—of injustice perhaps”) that she wishes she, too, could write in an inverted fashion. G, for his part, “believed that women could not be artists. As far as G’s wife was concerned, this was what most people believed, but it was unfortunate that he should be the one to say it out loud.”
Meanwhile, people occasionally ask G’s wife whether the paintings are painted right side up and subsequently signed and exhibited to suggest otherwise. They ask this question in private, as if “in her presence, they were finally safe to risk a display of stupidity.” This signals a radical double consciousness: she hears what is spoken and what is secret. And so, she sees more fully the dialectical trouble between marriage and art—the trouble she and her husband are cowed by. This gendered inequity disproportionately impacts women but deforms all experience: it makes all of us less free. Cusk’s women are often subjected to a life of “insufficient self-realization” and browbeaten by the god of Canonical Men. But the nudes G paints of his wife give lie to the fact that he can depict nothing of her underlying reality. He can access only his own attenuated way of seeing: “He simply saw his effect on her, saw in other words himself.” His life’s work exposes G’s own insufficiency in their dyad; after all, it takes two to make the “bourgeois couple trapped unto death in their godless and voluntary bondage.”
In contrast, Modersohn-Becker’s nudes are about “what a woman sees . . . a woman in the reality of her womanhood.” Rather than affecting impartiality, the artist foregrounds indeterminacy—both the opacity of self-knowledge and the other’s ineluctable unknowability. She paints her own expression, her sensual body, in extreme close-up—a tenacious reminder of painterly perspective. She shows her hand. As Cusk’s eye closes in on Modersohn-Becker, she offers something like an apologia for what she’s called the “annihilated perspective” of her recent writing. A truly female art, she contends, “would have to be composed chiefly of a sort of non-existence. In the absence of an inviolable self, the making of art becomes something bound to the self in a more violent way, a kind of self-immolation or suicide mission: the body is one’s only possession, and it must be given in exchange.” For women, there is no separation; no sovereignty; no objective correlative. We are the soil, the bedrock, the building’s frame. Modersohn-Becker’s career, of course, was tragically abridged: she died at thirty-one of a postpartum embolism. Childbirth ushered in the cessation of her vision. It’s an emblematic and haunting outcome in the “novel,” with its morbid procession of unfree and otherwise dying mothers.
Parade’s nihilistic dissection of marriage and motherhood seems the more organic sequel to Aftermath than Outline was, though, of course, that trilogy’s disaffiliation from the memoirist or autofictional “I” had its own protectionist rationale. On publication, Aftermath was subjected to acute viciousness by critics, with bystanders taking pleasure in the spectacle of a divorced woman getting attacked for “emotional narcissism.” It was “creative death,” she later remarked, “I was heading into total silence.” Is it any wonder Cusk cultivated a featureless identity in the Outline trilogy? Faye was (like Cusk) a recently divorced writer and mother of two children but could hardly be accused of “self-absorption.” She was merely a transcriptionist, an urn for the speech of others, a convex mirror stood up before her interlocutors, gazing silently back. The joke, always in Cusk, is on us. You don’t like my “I”? Fine, have two hundred pages where utter strangers talk at a woman-cipher. It’s the death, again, of Narcissus—the self displaced by nothingness or some figure pretending at it.
Parade, I confess, does have an “I” voice, but whether this speaker is self-identical across the book’s four sections isn’t certain. Mainly we know that the “I”—in any case, the “I” of “The Stuntman” and “The Diver”—is a woman living temporarily in Paris, one with proximity to the art world of communes and retrospectives. Aching toward liberation, this speaker offers a different artistic strategy—gendered dissociation. She attributes “female experiences . . . 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 my life.” In so doing, she sidesteps the “consequences in one way or another of my biological femininity”: marriage, sex, motherhood, violence; the roles and events that confine women “piercingly and inescapably in the moment.”
Art instead requires the “I” to leave the moment, step apart from self-presence, and navigate a place of creation that exists in some slantwise and timeless relation to everyday time. Whether this procedure gets Cusk’s narrator any closer to the unvarnished reality of the “early world,” I couldn’t say—it’s one technique among many in Parade. Louise Bourgeois, the art professionals claim, lived a woman’s life until her husband died, after which she lived a man’s. She was the best and worst of both genders. Elsewhere, the female painter of “The Midwife” seeks an abusive husband to replace her terrible parents—shame is the electric current of her experience; shame and domination propel her practice. Cusk refuses reducibility, as ever.
A few weeks ago, I passed a quiet hour in the Francesca Woodman exhibition at Gagosian in New York. Woodman’s self-portraits—with faceless women’s limbs peeling out from behind cracked wallpaper, blurred bodies of women, women encased, like the nymph Daphne, in dead bark—seemed to perfectly fit Cusk’s credos of female self-effacement. I was standing beside a chic older woman. She was telling her friend about Woodman’s suicide at twenty-two: “After a breakup, it seemed. I remember thinking, ‘If only she could have taken a few days to just breathe.’ Things might have gone differently.” The women murmured, then, about the apocalyptic texture of love in one’s twenties, the way a relationship’s end made it seem like nothing would ever be joyful again. And they wandered on, leaving me there in the surreality of our point of contact, the way I felt, suddenly, as if I’d woken to find myself in the pages of some other woman’s novel.
Jamie Hood is a poet, critic, and memoirist. She is the author of how to be a good girl, which will be reissued by Vintage next year, and Trauma Plot: A Life, which is forthcoming from Pantheon in February 2025.