Lucy Thynne

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Pulling a Stunt

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Parade, Rachel Cusk, Faber & Faber, 2024, pp.208, Hardback, £16.99
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I was walking home from work recently when a man caught my eyes, lifted his penis from his trousers and then replaced it. This happened so quickly that afterwards I wondered whether I had seen anything at all. He had timed it well, this salutation – to the very second that our streams of people flowed past each other – so that even though we were in a busy area, only I would see it. Afterwards, on the Tube, I replayed it all in my head, a little shocked; mainly grossed. By the time I was home, I had forgotten it.

I thought about this incident again reading Rachel Cusk’s new novel Parade, and its clever metaphor of ‘the stuntman’. The stuntman, Cusk explains, is a woman’s ‘alternate or double self’. The stuntman moves quickly, tricksy. The stuntman steps in when the violence of your surroundings resurges, absorbs the blow and then retreats, so that such experiences may play ‘no part in the ongoing story’ of a woman, or female-presenting person’s, life. In other words – if you are so lucky – the stuntman allows you to mute, forget. It is a means for women to psychologically coexist with the violence that hums, however quiet, around them.

In Parade, this metaphor manifests in the extreme. The female narrator is ‘hit forcibly in the head’ by a stranger (an incident that actually happened to Cusk); that the assailant is female, and the attack so random, catches her stuntman ‘off-guard’. ‘Automatically I had tried to understand it… as when one wakes in darkness in a strange room – as though the world, when unobserved, turns itself upside down.’ Much of the novel that follows is about how different characters make sense of their lives suddenly inverted, how change can reveal in ourselves another self that until then, has been concealed.

Parade is a challenging, beautiful book. It is split into four sections: the first, which flits between a first-person female narrator moving to Paris and whose experiences mirror Cusk’s, and various tales of artists called G, one of them a male painter who believes ‘women could not be artists’; the second, which delves into the story of the woman G, who moves from her ‘wild years’ as a young, successful artist to being increasingly controlled by her husband; the third, which concerns an al fresco dinner party where figures gather in the aftermath of a city’s parade, the only clue of the book’s title; and the fourth, where two mothers die: that of another G, a male filmmaker, and that of the author, Cusk having published this section as an essay earlier this year.

Cusk flits between these voices without warning. Sometimes their only division is a paragraph break. I have already said that this novel is hard but it is not hard to keep up: what is more exacting is the demand to make the connections between voices yourself. You are not required to know who the Gs are (from some online digging, they can variously be matched up with the artists George Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, Paula Modersohn Becker and Éric Rohmer), but to see that in the dedication to their artforms, they are interchangeable. This form feels a step beyond Cusk’s Outline trilogy, where a string of monologues were sustained, invisibly, by Faye’s story, the branch connecting all of them. In Parade, there is no singular, connecting voice to hold the Gs, only their rippling desire for that Cuskian obsession: freedom.

Freedom is a slippery thing for the female Gs. When the female G’s husband turns more controlling, threatened, among other things, by her success (‘You stupid woman’), she thinks about running away. And yet ‘the problem, as always, was her daughter’s body. She wished, again, that they could share a body.’ Having a child makes you two. This is a sentence for life: whenever Cusk’s ‘I’ is reading or working in her apartment, she hears the screams of babies and feels a particular anxiety, that though her children are grown up and far away, she is somehow responsible. When she writes, ‘I am a veteran of it. I want medals, a special uniform,’ you sense you are hearing her from the other side.

Freedom comes too in the discarding of yourself. The filmmaker G understands this in particular: a novel he wrote years earlier still ‘embarrasses him’, because a ‘novel was a voice’, and voices had to be explained, ‘every statement, even the most simple, was a function of personality.’ Behind the camera he is freer; as a ‘spy’, he can go ‘unseen.’ The dinner party section looks at this more intensely. A writer  called Thomas relates two anecdotes, one about his mother, who would daily lock herself away to write, but never did, and one about his wife, who had ‘lived quite contentedly’ as an unsuccessful poet until she realised that, when pushed to it, she is more fulfilled by teaching. Cusk gets at a different kind of stuntman here: one that keeps up the delusion, perhaps the most terrifying one, of an identity we tell ourselves is ours. Some people never see beyond it.

There will be readers who hate this book. But no one will be able to argue with the strength of Cusk’s sentences, which feel forged out of Cusk’s long writing career and are the best they have ever been. Reading them, I often had the sense of watching Cusk tunnelling towards something, each sentence almost perfect in its architecture and yet giving the impression of composure in real-time, like some kind of plumbing network reaching as far as possible into each facet of the human experience:

Does it help people to be seen, even when they don’t know it? A mother is continually seen by her children, whether or not she credits them with a point of view. From the beginning, they are amassing images of her, of her body… her body becomes the known point from which they broach all that is unknown. They know more about her than she does about them, since they have not yet become fully themselves. Yet her power to wound them is limitless.

The risk with a novel like this, its parts shifting like a huge, glittering river, is that it won’t coalesce into something whole. I wasn’t sure it did. But somehow it does. Ending with the death of the mothers feels right, the only way to bring the novel’s questions about parenthood into full relief. Cusk’s narrator and her siblings see, since having their own children, how deeply they were let down by their mother: ‘now we understood what it would be, to turn your back on your child’. Their mother was not their stuntman: what a horrible, shuddering thing to realise. And yet there is still hope, that the siblings glimpse together in the ‘curious devastation of dawn’. ‘In this meeting of darkness and light,’ Cusk writes, ‘was a beginning.’
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Headshot credit: (c) Siemon Scamell-Katz.

Lucy Thynne is a journalist who works in London.