The Goldsmiths Prize was established a decade ago to celebrate a quality in contemporary novels that (oddly, given the name) is not especially common: novelty. Indeed the “novel” is a bit of a misnomer: breaking new formal ground – repurposing or discarding existing conventions, discovering or imposing fresh ones – is, among modern practitioners, by no means a universal impulse.
The winner of this year’s Goldsmiths Prize is perhaps foremost among contemporary British novelists in her explicit, methodical dedication to that impulse, which in her hands is virtually a discipline. Rachel Cusk’s body of work is formidably distinctive, and her new novel, Parade, slim but complex, is the latest product of the systematic restlessness driving her 30-year career and its various metamorphoses.
Cusk’s is a high-minded quest for not just novelty but formal advance. It is an effort to plot a new course, in particular to the expression of female experience – perhaps most successfully in the scouring vividness of her Outline trilogy, with its impassively vigilant narrator, the female author as sheer witness, an absent presence.
Cusk has since spoken of wishing to find a “path to abstraction” – a route well-trodden in the visual arts but little attempted in fiction. Parade, which is about artists, is perhaps the closest she has come. Both distilled and wandering, intricate and amorphous, it is an elusive blend of art criticism, fictionalised biography, philosophical investigation, glittering description of landscapes, sharp portraiture, and the “torrential listening”, in Patricia Lockwood’s great phrase, that Cusk trialled in the Outline books. Parade is more than the sum of its parts in the sense that it leaves you struggling to sum up its parts, to compass them.
Divided into four chapters, “The Stuntman”, “The Midwife”, “The Diver” and “The Spy”, the book’s exoskeleton is composed of lightly encrypted biographies of a cluster of real artists, including a sculptor recognisably based on Louise Bourgeois and a film-maker inspired by Éric Rohmer (Cusk said she wanted the book’s “image world” to be “vaguely familiar”). Each segment refracts the others, and characteristic preoccupations emerge – what it takes to be an artist, especially in relation to one’s parents, motherhood and marriage – but they do not form a clean whole, except for each artist being referred to by the same initial: “G”.
Woven between these biographical sketches (“life shapes” in Cusk’s words) is “a very shapeless other thread of writing”. This strand might be called residually autofictional: it aimlessly relates the various experiences of Cusk’s typically blank narrator as she is randomly assaulted on the street, forced to move to a new apartment, holidays in a dilapidated cottage in a rugged valley by the sea (“Mollo’s farm”), goes to exhibitions, attends – seemingly silently – an al fresco dinner with various art world people and witnesses the death of her difficult mother.
This thread, source of the book’s finest passages, does not bind it together. It’s more like an internal stream running through the “illegible mountain” above Mollo’s farm, one of several images that suggest themselves as emblems for Parade’s unscalable form: “The few paths were meandering and indirect and rarely led to what could be seen most obviously ahead. They travelled off aimlessly or secretively elsewhere…. Behind them rose the mountain… composed of innumerable facets that flashed from its sides in the sun…. glinting rectilinear faces.”
Like Cusk’s other recent work, Parade contains plenty of stories but is not itself organised as one. The device of the cipher “G”, which helps to give the book its nebulous quality, turns the artists into archetypes, and their procession into something resembling a conceptual inquiry. Cusk’s form of novelty is always connected to this searching effort of thought (there’s a “new idea” in every sentence, as my co-judge, the novelist Sara Baume, put it), and it is Cusk’s serious, almost austere, commitment to that search which gives her work its compelling authenticity – as she writes of the mountain above the farm, its “violent authority”.
Parade
Rachel Cusk
Faber & Faber, 198pp, £16.99
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